This chapter explores the ways in which human movement and group membership were debated in the second century CE, primarily among the Greek authors influenced by the cultural phenomenon of the ‘Second Sophistic’. It examines, in particular, their expressions of unease at the thought of “Hellenic” identities being diluted as the result of population movements within the empire, as well as the occasional dismissal of such fears. These ideas were enabled by the widely diffused set of theoretical structures that all encouraged the perception of population groups as having essentialistically defined and largely unchanging – though corruptible – characteristics. Turning this human variety and the empire’s internal mobility into a tool in moralizing debate was an option that several writers within the sophistic movement took up. After discussing the epistemic basis for such nativist rhetoric, the chapter focuses on three particular cases: Polemon of Laodicea’s Hellenic chauvinism, Favorinus of Arles’ rejection of nativism while upholding essentialising patterns of thought, and Herodes Atticus’ allegorically replete anecdote on the rural strongman Agathion as preserved in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists.