[1][2] When it was first published in the US, it received considerable praise from the press; the Christian Science Monitor went so far as to credit it with "saving Latin".

K. Vadum Fractum and Kenneth Reckford called the book "superb entertainment" and noted correspondences between themes in Winnie-the-Pooh and Roman poetry.

[6] Michiel Verweij [fr], in a 2008 retrospective, argued that Lenard had carved out a niche by not copying the writing style of Cicero, as other Latinists had.

Even before publication, one scholar questioned the utility of the book as a teaching aid, saying "at the time when pupils would be expected to understand your Latin properly they would already have reached the age when the subject matter would be of no interest to them".

Five years after its publication, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Little Prince, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland were all translated into Latin.