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