White sheep, Italian waiters and what's Greek for Mushri?
DICTIONARY OF BRITISH CLASSICISTS. By Robert B. Todd, editor. 1,200pp.
Continuum. Pounds 495. - 1 85506997 0
Eduard Fraenkel was one of the most renowned classical scholars of the twentieth century: refugee to England from Nazi persecution; Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford from 1935 to 1953; radical re-interpreter of the Roman comedy of Plautus, who showed that it was much more than second-hand pastiche of lost Greek plays; pioneer in new methods of classical teaching (notably the German-style "seminar", rather than the traditional lecture or tutorial); and -to judge from the accounts of several of his women students -a serial groper.
Isobel Henderson, Tutor at Somerville, used to warn her students in advance that, although they would learn a lot, they would probably be "pawed about a bit". At least the Somervillians knew what to expect. According to her own memoirs, Mary Warnock, a student at Lady Margaret Hall, was not so prepared.
Fraenkel picked her up from one of his famous seminars in the early 1940s and promptly arranged private after-dinner tutorials.
These combined some heady and inspiring discussions of Latin and Greek with "kisses and increasingly constant fumblings with . . . (my) underclothes".
Warnock dreamt up a clever wheeze to continue with the teaching but to avoid the "pawing".
She invited her friend Imogen, who was over from Cambridge, to their sessions.
But Fraenkel was ahead of the game. Imogen, he pointed out, needed to pay more close attention to Pindar, whereas Mary should be concentrating on early Latin and the Agamemnon. And so he managed to end up with two evenings a week of this kind of sport, one with his "black sheep" and one with his "white" (as he himself dubbed them, on the basis of their hair colour). Time was only called when a less compliant student from LMH shopped him to her tutor, and the tutorials were stopped.
