 Adolf Michaelis was born in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, the son of the gynecologist Gustav Adolf Michaelis (1798–1848) and the nephew of Otto Jahn, who introduced scientific philological method into classical archaeology; Jahn first guided his nephew's interest in the classics.After Jahn's death, Michaelis produced in 1880 a second edition of Jahn's scholarly presentation of an excerpt of Pausanias' description of Greece, "Arx Athenarum a Pausania Descripta", offering the Greek text with Latin introduction and notes.The title was a modest understatement