Can one rely on Smythe’s grammar for reading Plutarque, Plotinus, Lucian, etc.
Assuming you mean Plutarch, of course Smyth is reliable for these authors. Why wouldn’t he be?
No, one cannot ‘rely on Smythe’s grammar for reading Plutarque, Plotinus, Lucian, etc.’
It obviously depends on what you’re looking for - Smyth will get you off the ground and a lot of its content of it will still apply often enough in Plutarch (let alone Lucian). The question is really how much you expect the grammar to follow Attic; if you need a treatment of the differences I think Blass-Debrunner-Funk is the popular one (and note of course that Lucian and Plutarch both Atticize to an extent). Full linguistic commentaries on individual authors will be your best (and only) choice if you want very thorough coverage of the grammar of authors like these.
As for Plotinus, I don’t think Smyth will stand a chance (that is, at covering the philological details that sometimes crop up). I’m not sure what would or if anything has been written that does. All I can say is I hope you have read Plato pretty carefully a few times through before you attempt him.
Because Smyth’s grammar is focused on Attic and pays very little attention to koine deviations.
Also, you picked up on Plutarque - standard French spelling - but not “Smythe”? 
That’s funny – probably because I was making sure that you really meant Plutarch, but Smythe is a frequent misspelling of the poor grammarian’s name (I’ve done that myself).
Thanks for a well thought out answer to the objection. I will say that both Plutarch and Lucian pretty heavily Atticize, and to the extent that they do Smyth is going to be helpful. Where they don’t, it’s not normally going to cause a problem for the reader, but I agree that BDF might be a helpful supplement.
And I hope never to read Plotinus – too many other authors on my bucket list.
It depends what kind of reader you are. One who relies on grammar heavily will find that they often do not Atticize. Plutarch is not generally held to be a particularly Atticizing author. (And personally I find the claim way overstated even for Lucian, almost invariably by those who want to emphasise the idea that “there’s a lot more out there in Ancient Greek than just the Attic canon.” This is true but the accompanying suggestion that there was no linguistic drift or that the Second Sophistic managed to correct for it completely, producing a language that can be taken as the same as ‘Attic Greek’, is mistaken.)
P.S. I’m not the OP.
Well, my subjective impression of both Lucian (he was my M.A. thesis author) and Plutarch (I’ve only read his Life of Cicero) is that both were comfortably in the Atticizing camp. But, perhaps you could supply some examples from these authors to show how their Greek is not that Attic?
These deviations are covered well by scholarship and are wide enough that to pick one example would be fatuous. Instead here are some references (some I think will be online):
Lucian:
Quick overview in “L’Atticisme de Lucien” (Jacques Bompaire) in “Lucien de Samosate” (ed. Alain Billaut).
Proper coverage in Schmid, “Der Atticismus” (best); Samuel Chabert, “L’Atticisme de Lucien” (not best). Also Deferrari, “Lucian’s Atticism: The Morphology of the Verb”.
(Many more I am sure.)
Lucian is an Atticist of course. But the case for his Atticism is far overstated, as I said, by those driven by an amateurish agenda. (It should go without saying that this is not targeted at you. I am speaking of the people who fallaciously exaggerate the unity of Greek across all times - as if to imply that the very act of Atticizing composition is to be celebrated rather than the result.)
Plutarch:
Brief description in Russell “Plutarch”, I think around page 18.
The only significant study, I think, is Burkard Weissenberger, “Die Sprache Plutarchs von Chaeronea und die Pseudo-Plutarchischen Schriften”. Also see Alfred Hein, “De Optativi apud Plutarchum Usu”.
(Again I am sure there is more)
But the general status of Plutarch as not all that Atticizing is widely enough agreed upon - see e.g. various mentions of him in the index to “A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language” (Egbert Bakker).
Commentaries will also mention this sort of thing. I just wanted to provide some focused studies.
Edit: if anyone knows any large-scale (book or dissertation-length) work on the language of either Lucian or Plutarch, which I failed to mention above, I would appreciate being informed of it.
Lucian is an Atticist of course. But the case for his Atticism is far overstated, as I said, by those driven by an amateurish agenda. (It should go without saying that this is not targeted at you. I am speaking of the people who fallaciously exaggerate the unity of Greek across all times - as if to imply that the very act of Atticizing composition is to be celebrated rather than the result.)
I found the discussion by Lawrence Kim “The Literary Heritage as Language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic “ chapter 6 of “A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language" (Egbert Bakker) helpful. He draws a distinction between the practice of the atticizing second sophistic writers and their statements about their practice. On Lucian he says “ [he] draws heavily from Old Comedy vocabulary, and is technically the most “Attic,” but still frequently diverges from Classical syntax, and nearly a quarter of his vocabulary is not attested in Attic prose.”
Kim also observes more generally that “The texts we possess, however, reveal enough variety to allow us to conclude that Second Sophistic Atticism was a far from monolithic phenomenon, either in theory or in practice.”
It is fascinating that this remnant of culture wars (aka “elite identity”) in the second century has such resonance today.
[emphasis mine]
I suspect lack of modern worldly awareness lets me down here. Perhaps you could expound on the “resonance today” a little?
If it seems off-topic, then you could perhaps PM me.
Thank you all for your highly scholarly debate. I would need some more practical hints however, so here is what I have found out. All modern commentators and translators of Plutarque into English, when mentioning reference grammars, do mention in their bibliographies Smythe and Goodwin. Only ! Besides, there are here and there some rare references to Kuhner. Well, that’s all, so, after all it looks like possible reading Plutarque with Smythe only.
I suspect lack of modern worldly awareness lets me down here. Perhaps you could expound on the “resonance today” a little?
Nothing more than what you had written and I had quoted that is “But the case for his Atticism is far overstated, as I said, by those driven by an amateurish agenda…I am speaking of the people who fallaciously exaggerate the unity of Greek across all times” Atticizing in the second sophistic had a role in shaping elite identities by making a claim on the “prestige” of an attic literary past which reminded me of those modern Greeks who emphasise the connection between the modern language and its Attic incarnation rather than celebrate the differences. Presumably they too are avid for a share in the “prestige” of their Attic “forebears”. Identity politics is not a recent invention.
Can one rely on Smythe’s grammar for reading Plutarque, Plotinus, Lucian, etc.
For reading them? Sure. Or even Morwood. Post questions here if you get in trouble somewhere.
Did I actually see a New Testament grammar suggested? [Edit: This refers to the recommendations for BDF made above.]
I have not seen any NT grammar suggested by any of the commentators for reading Plutarch.
While I fail to see why it would be fatuous to give examples, I nevertheless appreciate the references. One thing that I have noticed reading Lucian is his preponderant use of the perfect where in Attic authors we might expect the aorist, but that is again a subjective impression based on my at times fallible memory. My request for such examples was simply so that those of us with limited time and resources have more concrete examples for a take away and a better appreciation of what’s involved.
Yes, “the unity of Greek across all times…” usually with something of a political/cultural agenda. In NT studies, Caragounis comes to mind.
You did. Ironically one of the criticisms sometimes leveled against BDF is that it follows Smyth too closely without due attention to the Koine.