For the classicist H. J. Rose, Fraenkel's commentary was "perhaps the most erudite that any Greek play has ever had". Rose commended the book for espousing the practice of a thematic introduction and for its balance in presenting the Fraenkel's own views next to those of his predecessors. Rose concluded his review for The Journal of Hellenic Studies by saying "with confidence that the [commentary's] value is permanent". The reviewer C. Arthur Lynch called the edition a "source of joy and amazement", highlighting Fraenkel's willingness to admit irremediable difficulties in the text. The Hellenist J. C. Kamerbeek disapproved of the commentary's harsh criticism of other classicists but added that it was "a monument of 20th-century philology" (). Horace Fraenkel began publishing articles on Horace in the early 1930s. His Horace (1957) advanced an overall interpretation of the poet's work based on the analysis of individual texts. The book's preliminary chapter reconstructed the poet's life using the testimony of the Roman biographer Suetonius. The remainder of the book contained complete interpretations of selected poems with an emphasis of Horace's earliest and latest works. In Fraenkel's chapters on the Epodes and Satires, he argued that Horace had undergone a process of artistic maturation away from the imitation of his literary models (the Greek lyric poet Archilochus and the Roman satirist Gaius Lucilius) towards his own conception of the respective genres. A large central section dealt with the first three books of Odes. He showed how Horace developed the patterns of Greek lyric into an increasingly abstract form of literature. Concerning the poems addressing the emperor Augustus, Fraenkel argued that they did not contradict the political stances of Horace's youth, contradicting the views of the historian Ronald Syme. In The Roman Revolution, Syme depicted these poems as a form of propaganda for the Augustan regime. The book took an innovative view on Horace's Epistles, a collection of letters in dactylic metre; although most previous scholars had regarded them as either faithful reproductions of real-world letters or entirely fictitious, Fraenkel argued that they were of a "double nature", combining real and unreal elements. He interpreted the Carmen Saeculare, a celebratory hymn commissioned for the Secular Games of 17 BC, as a poem independent from its festival context, which marked Horace's return to lyric poetry. Thus, this usually neglected text became an important component in Fraenkel's reading of Horace's work. The final chapter covered the