Abstract This paper offers a response to Kostas Vlassopoulos' ‘Ethnicity and Greek History: Re-examiningour Assumptions’, especially his comments about the unit of analysis that we should adopt in studying ancient ethnicity, the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism, and the limitations of testing evidence against definitional models. It also considers the role that religious ritual played in professions of ethnicity as well as the heuristic utility in distinguishing between ‘aggregative’ and ‘oppositional’ identities or between ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’ definitions of Hellenic identity. Finally, it questions prevailing opinions about the relationship between ethnicity and the ethnic group.