Michael A. Flower

Michael Attyah Flower (born June 26, 1956) is an American classicist and historian of ancient Greece. He was the David Magie '97 Class of 1897 Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he taught from 2003 until his retirement in 2026. A specialist in Greek historiography and ancient Greek religion, with particular interests in Sparta and Achaemenid Persia, Flower is regarded as a leading contemporary scholar of the historian and soldier Xenophon, and has also published influential studies of Greek divination and of the fragmentary fourth-century BC historian Theopompus.

Early life and education

Michael Attyah Flower was born in Lynwood, California on June 26, 1956. As a teenager, Flower won the Parkes Weber Prize of the Royal Numismatic Society in London for 1975, for an essay on the gold coinage of Tarentum under Alexander I of Epirus and Alexander of Macedonia. He attended the summer session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1977 and received a Bachelor of Arts in classical languages from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He received a Ph.D. in classics from Brown University in 1986, supported by a University Fellowship (1981–82) and a Michaelides Fellowship (1985); his dissertation formed the basis of his first book, on the Greek historian Theopompus of Chios. He went on to edit The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which his colleagues would later describe as the most significant product of his Xenophon research and a major contribution to the author's renewed standing in contemporary scholarship. Flower has continued to work comparatively on Greek religion, drawing on Near Eastern, Tibetan, and Native American traditions, including in the influential article "Understanding Delphi Through Tibet" (Greece & Rome, 2018). His development of Princeton's Predoctoral (later Horizon) Fellowship program, aimed at broadening the pool of prospective doctoral students, has been adopted as a model by other departments at Princeton and elsewhere.

Personal life

Flower is married to classicist Harriet Isabel Flower, a historian of ancient Rome who was the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton. Harriet Flower joined him on the Franklin & Marshall College faculty in 1994, where the couple shared a single teaching position, and the two moved to Princeton together in 2003. Following their joint transfer to emeritus status in 2026, the couple relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Selected publications

Theopompus of Chios: History and Rhetoric in the Fourth Century BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; paperback with postscript, 1997. Georgica: Greek Studies in Honour of George Cawkwell (co-editor with Mark Toher). London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, Bulletin Supplement 58, 1991. Herodotus, Histories, Book IX (edited with introduction and commentary, with John Marincola). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. The Seer in Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Xenophon's Anabasis, or The Expedition of Cyrus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon (editor). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.