Postclassical Greek

This volume gathers papers from the First Postclassical Greek Conference, held in Cologne from 24 to 26 March 2021. Its subject is the Greek language of the Postclassical period, an extremely complex and internally diverse stage of the language.

The papers cover the historical development of Greek, including word order, negation, semantic shifts and counterfactuals. They also deal with standardization processes, the convergence of dialects and the linguistic change that went with it, the balance between innovation and reuse in literary Greek, and the layout of ancient texts in manuscripts.

The contributors revised their papers after discussing them within the DFG scientific network on Postclassical Greek, which the editors organized from March 2022 to February 2024. The thirteen resulting contributions draw on literary and documentary sources, New Testament Greek and inscriptions. Together they aim to give readers fresh insight into this period and to show how well philological and linguistic methods work together in the study of ancient languages.