This chapter offers an approach to the discourses of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek epic, specifically Homer’s Iliad and Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter begins by defining, theorising and applying a transhistorical concept of race and ethnicity which makes it possible to analyse the literary representations of ancient manifestations of ethnic and racialised oppression. Murray argues that epic poetry transmitted to its receiving society, whether ancient or modern, a mythical social order that placed the heroes, the demi-gods, at the top of the human hierarchy, and non-heroes, the people who are oppressed and exploited by the heroes, at the bottom. She also examines the specific construct of the epic hero, who can only really exist where non-heroes can be and are dehumanised by him. Murray analyses examples of this hierarchical structure and argues that this mythic social order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial.