Greek ethnography, it is often said, starts before ethnographic literature itself came into existence. Long before Herodotus and Hecataeus, there was Aristeas of Proconnesus. Before Aristeas, there was the Odyssey. And before the Odyssey, there was Iliad 13.1–9: when Zeus wants a break from the fighting around Troy, he turns his gaze to “the horse-breeding Thracians, the Mysians who fight in close formation, the brilliant Hippemolgi who feed on milk, and the Abii who are most righteous of all men”. There he lingers, and “not at all did he turn back to Troy any more”. Already Strabo treated the passage as an early example of ethnographic writing. ¹ Modern scholars follow suit, and so a few lines in the Iliad become the starting point for an entire literary tradition. But what does it mean to say that “the primitivistic form of exoticism… start [ed] with the author of the Iliad”? ² Or that we have here “the first extant case of Greek idealization of barbarian races”? ³ The first claim amounts to mere speculation: quite apart from the problems we have in dating the Iliad, we do not of course know when and how ethnographic ‘exoticism’started being articulated in Greek. The second claim is banal if we grant that the Iliad is indeed the oldest extant text of Greek literature. What these assessments have in common is the fact that they single out a specific passage in the Iliad, and read it with hindsight. This chapter investigates how Il. 13.1–9 relates to the rest of the poem, and what it can tell us about its poetics of human and divine space. I want to make two points in particular. First, the Iliad does not mark the beginning of Greek ethnography in any meaningful sense. Quite the contrary: the poem displays a sophisticated understanding of an already existing ethnographic discourse, to which it responds, and which it appropriates in subtle and surprising ways. Secondly, the ethnographic passage in Iliad 13 needs to be understood both in the context of the Iliad’s more general attitude to cultural space (which in turn is shaped by its broader poetic concerns), and its immediate narrative context.