“Unlicensed Greek”: The “Dialect of Alexandria” in Ancient Greek Scholarship

This paper aims to analyse the development of the notion of “Alexandrian Greek” in ancient Greek scholarship. In the Hellenistic and early Imperial treatises On the Dialect of the Alexandrians, Alexandria represents the vantage point from which to examine forms in use in postclassical Greek (not exclusively Alexandrian localisms) and show that they are formally correct and also used in literature. In the Imperial and Byzantine sources, the Ἀλεξανδρεῖς (‘Alexandrians’) are used as a sociolinguistic category in opposition to both Atticizing Greek and the standard (high, literary) Koine. This transformation in the notion of “Alexandrian Greek” from Hellenistic to Imperial times likely reflects the evolution of the Greek approaches to language correctness.