author
Isaac Flagg
1843–1931
A Harvard-educated classicist who also wrote poems and verse dramas, this American scholar brought Greek and Latin literature to students and general readers with unusual energy. His work ranges from language textbooks to imaginative retellings of classical myth.
1 Audiobook
Circe : A dramatic fantasy
by Isaac Flagg
About the author
Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1843, Isaac Gonzalez Flagg was an American classical scholar, teacher, and writer. Reference sources agree that he graduated from Harvard in 1864 and later earned a Ph.D. at Göttingen in 1871, a path that placed him firmly in the generation of U.S. scholars shaped by both American and German classical training.
Flagg taught at Cornell before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where he became known as a professor of Greek and Latin. Alongside his academic work, he published books designed to help students read classical languages, including A Writer of Attic Prose and editions of authors such as Plato and Cornelius Nepos.
He also wrote creative work of his own, including Hylethen, and Other Poems, Circe, and Persephone. That mix of scholarship and literary imagination gives his books a distinctive character: even when he was teaching grammar or editing ancient texts, he remained deeply drawn to the dramatic and poetic life of the classics. He died in Berkeley, California, in 1931.