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In the last two decades, novel historical linguistic approaches such as historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics have been developed to explain how the use of language has changed over the course of time. Both approaches have only recently been applied to classical languages. This paper will demonstrate the utility of methods from the field of historical pragmatics, a field which aims to describe how patterns of language use changed across texts and periods in the past. The approach will be illustrated by the development of performative speech acts from archaic Greek to classical Greek. First, evidence is presented for the metaphorical origins of performative verbs; for example, performative verbs of begging have developed from literal meanings of ‘reach’ or ‘touch’. Next, the morphosyntactic changes are examined which erstwhile performative verb forms undergo diachronically, as they move to parenthetical positions, lose their complements and performative force, and obtain politeness functions over time. I also plea for further historical pragmatic investigations, not only to go beyond the synchronic pragmatic approach that has been dominant in the Netherlands, but also to exploit the linguistic potential of texts from later periods which are still underresearched.