Horus (athlete) explained

Horus (Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: Ὦρος; fl. 4th century) was a Cynic philosopher and Olympic boxer, who was victorious at the Olympic games in Antioch in 364 AD.

He was born in Alexandria, son of one Valens; Horus was originally a student of rhetoric and an athlete and was a victor at the Ancient Olympic Games in Antioch in 364,^[1] probably as a boxer.^[2] Horus was also commended in that year, alongside his brother Phanes, to Maximus praefectus Aegypti, and Eutocius.^[3] He later turned to Cynic philosophy.

Horus appears as an interlocutor in Macrobius's Saturnalia,^[4] (dramatic date 384) and as a friend of Symmachus, who commended him to Nicomachus Flavianus.^[5]

References

• Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, John Robert Martindale, J. Morris, (1971), The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, page 445. Cambridge University Press
• R. Bracht Branham, Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, (2000), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, page 396. University of California Press

Notes and References

1. [Libanius]
2. Macrobius, Saturnalia i. 7. 3
3. Libanius, Epistulae 1278; 1279
4. Macrobius, Saturnalia vii. 7. 8; 17. 14, etc.
5. Symmachus, Epistulae ii. 39