FLORUS, a Roman historian, author of the Epitome de Gestis Romanorum, has by some writers been identified with the Lucius Julius Florus who lived in the time of Augustus, and to whom Horace addressed two of his epistles; but this position is hardly tenable, as Florus in the introduction to his history writes of the emperor Trajan as then reigning. By others he is, on account of certain similarities in style, identified with the Publius Annius Florus who lived in the time of Hadrian, and wrote a dialogue on the question whether Virgil was an orator or a poet, and the Pervigilium Veneris, an imitation of Horace’s Secular Hymn. In some MSS. of the Epitome, the name of the writer is mentioned as L. Annaeus Florus, in others as L. Julius Florus, in others L. Annaeus Seneca, and in the Bamberg codex Julius Florus. If the historian be the same person as the poet and rhetorician, Julius Annaeus must be regarded as a corruption of Publius Annius. The Epitome of Floras is compiled chiefly from Livy, and gives a condensed view of Roman history from the foundation of the city to the closing of the temple of Janus by Augustus. The details of geography and chronology are not always to be implicitly trusted; and the style is declamatory, and rather that of a panegyrist than of a critical historian. The best editions of the work are that of Titze, Prague, 1819, and that of O. Jahn, Leipsic, 1852. The latter has been revised by C. Halm, Leipsic, 1854.