This edited volume, based on an international workshop organised in 2022 at the Finnish Institute at Athens, explores the variety of ways in which the Greeks – and in their footsteps, the Romans – ‘marked’ the North and its peoples, rendering them intelligible, distinct, and bounded. Particular attention is given to how the ethnographical tradition operated through knowledge-creation processes, topoi, and established stereotypical beliefs and commonplace imagery. What emerges is the outline of a tradition of ‘writing the North into being’.