David Mortier Eduard Fraenkel was a German-British philologist.
Background and early life
Eduard Fraenkel was born to Jewish parents in Berlin. His father was a wine dealer, and his mother the daughter of an important publishing family. At the age of ten, Fraenkel suffered from an attack of osteomyelitis in his right arm that deformed his right hand. From 1897 to 1906 he attended the Askanisches Gymnasium in Berlin, where he was educated in Greek and Latin. At University, he began to study law, but soon turned his attention to Classics at Berlin University under the great philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. After two years, he moved from Berlin to Göttingen where he stayed until 1912, studying under Friedrich Leo.
After losing his post under the antisemitic laws passed in 1933, Fraenkel emigrated to Great Britain. In 1934 he was elected to a Bevan fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, but later in the year took up the Corpus Chair of Latin at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a post he held until 1953. He was known to be an impressive and exhilarating, if formidable, teacher of both Latin and Greek literature. His wartime seminars on Aeschylus's Agamemnon were famous both in their own right and also for forming the basis of his edition of the play, published in 1950, which remains a monument of 20th-century classical scholarship. After 1953 he continued teaching as an honorary fellow. He received the freedom of the city of Sarsina, the birthplace of the playwright Plautus, to whose study Fraenkel made groundbreaking and lasting contributions. Several prominent female scholars have remarked since Fraenkel's death that he was known for inappropriate contact with his some of his female students during private lessons. Isobel Henderson, a tutor at Somerville College, warned students that they would learn much from Fraenkel but they would be "pawed about a bit." One of these students, the philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock, recounted being groped by Fraenkel in her memoirs. Nevertheless, she later remarked that Fraenkel was the best teacher she had ever known and stresses that his status as a classical scholar is undiminished by his conduct towards women. Cambridge classicist Mary Beard referred to him as a "serial groper", but noted that biographies omitted the "persistent sexual harassment" intrinsic to his teaching. In a 2017 interview, Roger Tomlin described Fraenkel as "a bully": in the one seminar of Fraenkel's that Tomlin attended he described Fraenkel trying to embarrass women by asking them ridiculous questions, like what an 'ithyphallic metre' was. Fraenkel took his own life on 5 February 1970, aged 81, a few hours after his wife died of natural causes.
Works
Eduard Fraenkel was one of the most prominent and respected classical philologists of the 20th century, publishing monumental studies of both Greek and Latin poets. Most well known are his book-length study of the Roman comic poet Plautus, Plautinisches im Plautus, which was later expanded and translated into Italian as Elementi Plautini in Plauto. An English version, entitled Plautine Elements in Plautus, was published in 2007 on the basis of the German and Italian versions. Also notable are his magisterial three volume text, commentary, and translation of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, which remains one of the standard works of scholarship on that play, and a valuable study of the poetry of Horace.
