The Alexandrine grammarians were philologists and textual scholars who flourished in Hellenistic Alexandria in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, when that city was the center of Hellenistic culture. Despite the name, the work of the Alexandrine grammarians was never confined to grammar, and in fact did not include it, since grammar in the modern sense did not exist until the first century BCE. In Hellenistic and later times, grammarian refers primarily to scholars concerned with the restoration, proper reading, explanation and interpretation of the classical texts, including literary criticism. However unlike Atticism, their goal was not to reform the Greek in their day.
The Alexandrine grammarians undertook the critical revision of the works of classical Greek literature, particularly those of Homer, and their studies were profoundly influential, marking the beginning of the Western grammatical tradition. From the beginning, a typical custom, and methodological bias of this tradition was to focus their commentary and analysis on de-contextualized sentences.
