Himerius, master

Himerius is named with the honorific title 'master' (likely Latin magister or Greek didaskalos, denoting a teacher of rhetoric or a court official) as the recipient of letters preserved in the correspondence of Basil of Caesarea, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and the emperor Julian. The collections place him in the fourth- and fifth-century eastern Roman world, within the Greek rhetorical and ecclesiastical circles of Cappadocia and Syria. The name was borne by more than one figure of the period - most famously Himerius of Prusa (c. 315-c. 386), the celebrated sophist who taught rhetoric at Athens and was esteemed at Julian's court - but the surviving letters do not by themselves establish which Himerius is meant in each case, and he is otherwise little attested as an individual. He is known here chiefly as an addressee of these letters, probably a rhetor, teacher, or official of standing whose own writings, if any, do not survive.