My book project examines poetics and political economy in Homer and Hesiod. It explores how epic narratives attend to their social infrastructure, to the work of slaves, artisans, and wage laborers who produce the wealth that sustains the genre’s landowning protagonists. “The world of epic,” understood as a fictive social order, has been studied intensively for clues about its historical and ideological content. This project aims to reconceptualize one component of this world, its political economy, as an aesthetic process. It asks how the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Works and Days condition their audiences to project a coherent totality from abundant but scattered details—about labor, commodities, and social domination—presented in the margins of the narratives. It also asks how these glimpses of an encompassing social context variously enrich and destabilize the epics’ poetic agendas. Drawing on recent developments in Marxian literary theory, the project understands the epic economy as a conflicted aesthetic terrain in which the labor of epic’s elites is valorized and reified even as audiences are led to detect its dependence on the exploited labor of minor characters and perceive narrative pathways foreclosed by the genre’s social form.