Lyrnessos () — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Lyrnessos — Lyrnessos beneath Ida — the sacked city whose stolen bride kindled the Wrath.

A Trojan-allied town at the foot of Mount Ida, ruled by the brothers Mynes and Epistrophos. Achilles razed it in his pre-Iliad raids, killing both kings and carrying off Briseis — the captive whose later seizure by Agamemnon lit the quarrel that opens the Iliad. There is no return to Lyrnessos: king and city perished years before Troy fell.

Leader at Troy: Lyrnessos.

Role in the Trojan War: Trojan ally in the hill-country below Ida. Its spearmen fought under the brothers Mynes and Epistrophos until Achilles stormed the walls in his early Troad campaign; from its plunder came Briseis, and with her the seed of the Wrath that nearly broke the Achaean host.

The homecoming: No king came home — the city itself was ash before Troy ever fell.

Lyrnessos stood in the Trojan hill-country at the foot of Mount Ida, a walled town among the Leleges' neighbours, rich in flocks and vines, close by Thebe under Plakos and by Pedasos on the Satnioeis. It was no Achaean realm of the returns but a casualty of the war's opening years — one of the towns that fed Priam's cause with spearmen and paid for it in fire. Its kings were the brothers Mynes and Epistrophos, "warriors that bare the spear, sons of king Euenos Selepos' son." To the poets Lyrnessos is remembered less for what it did than for what was torn from it. For before ever the great battles on the plain, fleet-footed Achilles ranged the Troad with his Myrmidons (MYR), harrying the towns beneath Ida — three-and-twenty cities, he boasts, that he laid waste. Lyrnessos he stormed and spoiled; he slew Mynes and Epistrophos both, and drove off the herds, and out of its wealth carried a deep silver oil-flask that he kept to the last. In that same raid, driving his cattle down from Ida, the Dardanian Aineias (DAR) was caught in Achilles' path and barely escaped with his life — "once before drave he me with his spear from Ida, when he harried our kine and wasted Lyrnessos and Pedasos; but Zeus delivered me out of his hand." So the sack of Lyrnessos marks the first of the two times Aeneas fled the son of Peleus, and binds this little Trojan town to the man fated to carry Troy's remnant westward. And from the ruin Achilles took Briseis of the lovely hair, wife of dead Mynes. She and her sisters mourned that day: "swift Achilles slew my husband and wasted godlike Mynes' city," she cries over Patroklos' corpse, her three brothers slain in the same hour before their own walls. This is the deepest cross-link the atlas can draw, for the war's whole plot pivots on Lyrnessos' captive. When Agamemnon of Mycenae (MYC) — forced to surrender his own prize Chryseis — seized Briseis from Achilles' hut in recompense, he kindled the menis, the ruinous wrath with which the Iliad opens; Achilles withdrew to the ships, and "so many Achaians bit the wide earth" for the sake of a girl won at Lyrnessos. The town's fall thus reaches forward to shape the entire Greek war effort it was destroyed to weaken. Lyrnessos belonged to the wider Trojan alliance (TRO), and its fate mirrors that of neighbouring Thebe (THE), Andromache's city under Plakos, which Achilles sacked in the same eastward sweep. At the dramatic present of the returns there is no throne to restore and no lord to sail home: Mynes and Epistrophos are ten years dead, the walls thrown down, the women scattered among Achaean tents. Where other kingdoms in this atlas wait on a nostos, Lyrnessos endures only as a name — spoken in the Catalogue of Ships to mark the origin of Achilles' idle grief, and wept again in Briseis' lament. Its return is an anti-return: the city that never outlived the war it helped to fight.

“when swift Achilles slew my husband and wasted godlike Mynes' city” — Iliad 19.295-296