Abstract
Specialists of the history of Ancient Greek scholarship and modern-day sociolinguists alike have made observations regarding the seemingly “distinctive” status of syntax: the former have argued there is no coherent theory of syntax in Ancient grammatical treatises, and the latter that syntactic variation is much less prominent in modern languages than lexical or phonetic/orthographic variation. The aim of this contribution is to confront these two perspectives by studying linguistic variation in three different types of sources: petitions in the Katochoi of the Sarapieion archive (II BCE), Phrynichus’ Ecloga (II CE), and the Life of Euthymius and its later metaphrasis (VI/X CE). It appears that syntactic variation plays a different role in these three types of sources, which I explain by referring to the cognitive status of syntax, which is more schematic and complex than lexis, and therefore less easily focused upon in “observer-centered” sources such as the Ecloga. At the same time, I suggest that culture-specific explanations should be taken into account, too.
