This chapter discusses the ways in which physiognomical argumentation in late-imperial texts offers us some clues into discrimination against those – both neighbours and strangers – who were deemed physically non-normative. Stemming from the physiognomical theories originally formulated in the Hellenistic era and the second-century CE, writers of the Later Empire used physiognomical analogies and inferences in order to draw conclusions about the moral and mental qualities of not only individuals but even entire population groups. These speech acts, relying as they did on the range of phenotypic variety among the inhabitants of the empire, cast these physical traits as indications of ineluctable, essential differences. In many ways, the diagnostic gaze of the physiognomist and his audience projected the social, ethnic and gender-based stereotypes and discrimination into the human diversity of the Roman Empire’s inhabitants, reinforcing ideas of normativity and even functional segregation.