Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel FBA () was a German classical scholar who served as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford from 1935 until 1953. Born to a family of assimilated Jews in the German Empire, he studied classics at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen. In 1934, antisemitic legislation introduced by the Nazi Party forced him to seek refuge in the United Kingdom where he eventually settled at Corpus Christi College.
Fraenkel established his academic reputation with the publication of a monograph on the Roman comedian Plautus, ('Plautine Elements in Plautus', 1922). The book was developed from his doctoral thesis and changed the study of Roman comedy by asserting that Plautus was a more innovative playwright than previously thought. In 1950, he published a three-volume commentary on the Agamemnon by the Greek playwright Aeschylus which has been described by the classicist H. J. Rose as "perhaps the most erudite that any Greek play has ever had". He wrote a monograph, entitled Horace (1957), on the Roman poet Horace after retiring from his teaching post.
Biographers place particular emphasis on the impact of Fraenkel's teaching at Oxford, where he led a weekly seminar on classical texts. A feature of European academic life that had been rare at the university, these classes influenced the intellectual development of many Oxford undergraduates. His seminars on the Agamemnon were the subject of a poem by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. In 2018, following a petition by the student body, Corpus Christi decided to rename a room in the college that had been named after Fraenkel in reaction to allegations of sexual harassment against him. Summarising Fraenkel's contributions to the discipline, the Hellenist Hugh Lloyd-Jones described him as "one of the most learned classical scholars of his time" due to his acquaintance with a diverse range of disciplines within the Classics.
Early life and education Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel was born on 17 March 1888 in Berlin, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His family were Jewish but had assimilated and prospered economically. His mother Edith was the sister of Hugo Heimann, a Social Democratic politician and publisher of law books who helped Fraenkel develop an interest in the history of law. His father, Julius Fraenkel, worked as a wine merchant. Through him, Fraenkel was related to two philologists: his cousin Ernst Fraenkel was a scholar of the Baltic languages, and his father's uncle Ludwig Traube was one of the founders of the discipline of palaeography. When he was around ten, Fraenkel contracted osteomyelitis. The life-threatening illness left his right arm deformed.
From 1897 to 1906 Fraenkel attended the in the borough of Berlin-Tempelhof, where his teachers included the mythographer Otto Gruppe, whom Fraenkel credited in his doctoral thesis with inspiring his interest in classical antiquity. In spite of these leanings, he enrolled at the University of Berlin to study law, as antisemitic hiring conventions would have made it difficult to obtain a teaching position at a German university. During his time as a student of law, Fraenkel began to be mentored by the Hellenist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, whose lectures he attended in his own time. After a visit to Rome in late 1907, Fraenkel formally changed his degree subject to classical philology. In 1909, he transferred to the University of Göttingen to continue his studies under the Latinist Friedrich Leo and the linguist Jacob Wackernagel. In 1912, he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on Roman comedy entitled ('Selected Studies on Middle and New Comedy').
Career in Germany
Fraenkel's first academic appointment was in 1913 as an assistant at the , a lexicographical project based in Munich. After briefly working at a secondary school in Berlin-Charlottenburg, he began the process of habilitation in 1917 at the University of Berlin and began to teach there as an untenured lecturer, known in German as . In 1918, Fraenkel married Ruth von Velsen, a classical scholar who gave up her career to support him. They had three sons and two daughters, one of whom was the mathematician Edward Fraenkel. Having been promoted to an extraordinary professorship at Berlin in 1920, Fraenkel was appointed a full professor of Latin at the University of Kiel in 1923. His appointment followed the publication of a monograph on the Roman comedian Plautus which established his reputation in the discipline.
In 1928, Fraenkel accepted an offer to return to the University of Göttingen. His three-year stint there was a difficult period for him and his family; his son Albert died from an illness and Fraenkel was subject to antisemitism in the context of what the classicist Gordon Williams described as "personal quarrels" within the faculty. In 1931, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Freiburg, where he experienced a fulfilling personal life and hoped to settle permanently. However, his tenure at the university was interrupted in early 1933, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had come to power. In April of that year, a Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, prohibiting Jews from teaching at universities. Having lost his post, he remained in Germany for the remainder of the year and faced increasing discrimination.
Exile in England Fraenkel spent part of 1934 at Christ Church College of the University of Oxford, having been invited by the faculty of Classics and the classical scholar Gilbert Murray. In August, after the faculty at Oxford could not extend Fraenkel's stay, he was elected to a Bevan Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Helped by his friend—the Latinist Donald Robertson—Fraenkel and his family moved to Cambridge later that year.
When it proved difficult to sustain his family with his position at Trinity, Fraenkel began planning a lecture tour through the United States for late 1934, by which he hoped to find a permanent appointment. Before he could embark on the tour, the Corpus Christi Professorship of Latin at Oxford became vacant after the resignation of Albert Curtis Clark. Fraenkel applied for the chair with the support of many British classicists including the future Vice-Chancellor of the university Maurice Bowra, and A. E. Housman, the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge. His candidacy was opposed by novelist and M.P. John Buchan who protested in The Sunday Times the "importation of foreigners" to British universities. Fraenkel was elected to the chair in 1935 and cancelled his commitments in the United States.
Upon his election, Fraenkel became a fellow of Corpus Christi College and moved into a house on Museum Road. In addition to lectures on Latin poetry, including on the works of Catullus, Horace, and Vergil, he also taught seminars on both Greek and Latin texts. Attended by students and academics, these seminars were a feature of European academic life that was rare at Oxford before Fraenkel's arrival. During term time, participants met once a week to conduct "a slow and detailed examination", reading and discussing the text at a pace of under 10 lines per hour. Individual students were asked to prepare on specific passages with Fraenkel commenting on their work and challenging them on points of interest including interpretation, textual criticism, and the history of classical scholarship. From autumn term 1936 to spring term 1942, the seminars covered the Agamemnon by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, on which Fraenkel published a three-volume commentary in 1950.
Retirement and death In 1953, Fraenkel retired from his academic appointment, but kept giving lectures and leading seminars. In around 1955, he met the Italian cleric , who directed a scholarly publishing house, . Working with De Luca, he re-edited Leo's and two studies by the German philologist , and . In 1957, Fraenkel published a monograph on Horace. While Fraenkel remained active long into his retirement, Ruth's health began to deteriorate. She died on 5 February 1970; Fraenkel killed himself on the same day, four hours later.
Contributions to classical scholarship
Plautus In the late 19th century, study of the comedies of Plautus was dominated by the idea that his plays were largely derived from examples of Greek middle comedy, most of which have been lost. Scholars treated Plautus's plays chiefly as a means of retrieving information about this lost Greek genre. Fraenkel's mentor, Friedrich Leo, took this line of argumentation in his 1885 study . In 1922, Fraenkel published a monograph entitled ('Plautine Elements in Plautus'), founded upon his doctoral work conducted under Leo. The book was designed to analyse Plautus as an author in his own right and not as a source for middle comedy.
Fraenkel's approach to this problem was to isolate recurring details and forms of expression as a basis for the reconstruction of Plautus's original contribution to the genre of comedy. Using this method, he identified four elements which he deemed characteristic of Plautus: the opening formulae of direct speeches; his characters' habit to intimate their own transformation into someone else; his use of Greek mythology; and his treatment of inanimate objects as animate. Building on these observations, he went on to delineate the main areas of the genre where he considered Plautus to have innovated. These include the length of direct speech, the character of the "crafty slave", and his creative use of sung interventions (). He concluded that, contrary to the predominant academic consensus, Plautus was an "innovative creator in his own right". In 1960, an Italian translation of was published, which gave Fraenkel the opportunity to add a list of amendments to his original argument.
Writing for Classical Philology, the classicist Henry Prescott considered Fraenkel's book the most important contribution to the study of Roman comedy since Leo's . Although Prescott described its conclusions as an "important swing of the pendulum" towards recognising Plautus's originality, he regarded Fraenkel's identification of typical elements as the more successful part of the argument. In 2007, the Hellenist C. W. Marshall stated that the book was "insightful, thought-provoking and at times very frustrating", adding that Fraenkel's judgement of previous scholarship had "stood the test of time". The classicist Lisa Maurice wrote that, even though some of its arguments had been rejected, was "the catalyst for modern Plautine scholarship".
Aeschylus Fraenkel had begun to show interest in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus as early as 1925 but focused on Latin literature in the years leading up to his application for the Corpus Professorship. He developed his thoughts on the play in his weekly seminars held from 1936 to 1942. From March 1942, a group of friends around the Latinist R. A. B. Mynors and the historian John Beazley began to support Fraenkel in the process of preparing his notes for publication. Parts of his work, including a translation of the Greek text, had to be translated from German into English. In 1943, Fraenkel submitted a manuscript for a commentary on the play to Oxford University Press. Although Kenneth Sisam, the responsible delegate of the press, took a favourable view of it, the publication process was held up due to concerns about the manuscript's exceptional length, leading Sisam to describe the commentary as "a Teutonic monster". The book was published in 1950 in three volumes.