Eduard Fraenkel

Eduard Fraenkel FBA
Born	Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel (1888-03-17)17 March 1888 Berlin, Prussia, German Empire
Died	5 February 1970(1970-02-05) (aged 81) Oxford, England
Spouse	Ruth von Velsen ​ (m. 1918)​
Children	5, including Edward
Relatives	Hugo Heimann (uncle) Ernst Fraenkel (cousin) Ludwig Traube (granduncle)
Awards	Kenyon Medal (1965)
Academic background
Education	Askanisches Gymnasium [de] University of Berlin University of Göttingen
Thesis	De media et nova comoedia quaestiones selectae (1912)
Doctoral advisor	Friedrich Leo
Influences	Otto Gruppe Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff Friedrich Leo Jacob Wackernagel
Academic work
Discipline	Classics
Institutions	University of Kiel University of Göttingen University of Freiburg University of Oxford
Notable works	Plautinisches im Plautus (1922) Aeschylus, Agamemnon (1950) Horace (1957)

Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel FBA ((1888-03-17)17 March 1888 – (1970-02-05)5 February 1970) 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, Plautinisches im 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".^[1] 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 re-name 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.^[2]