The purpose of this book is to show that the ethnic groups of ancient Greece, like many ethnic groups throughout the world today, were not ultimately racial, linguistic, religious or cultural, but social groups whose 'origins' in extraneous territories were just as often imagined as they were real. This is the first study to treat the subject from a truly interdisciplinary point of view, embracing literature, myth, archaeology, linguistics and social anthropology. It also outlines the history of the study of ethnicity in Greek antiquity.