Attic irregularities: their reinterpretation in the light of Atticism

The linguistic Atticist movement of the second and third centuries AD, an extraordinary revival of the classical Attic dialect for elegant Greek writing and speech, has been much discussed in connection with its origins, social and literary uses, and somewhat variable linguistic manifestations. This paper argues for one consequence of linguistic Atticism: that following the peak of linguistic Atticism it became difficult to label a form as 'wrong' if it was also labelled 'Attic'. It is argued that this change can be seen through later misinterpretations of earlier authors, who treated Attic as a dialect that could be wrong as well as right.