Building on previous work by amongst others J. Wackernagel, E. Fraenkel and K.J. Dover, this study develops the hypothesis that a number of Ancient Greek word order rules (most notably but not exclusively Wackernagel's Law) apply to the 'colon' or 'intonation unit (IU)', rather than to syntactic units such as the clause. The study is based on an extensive corpusdatabase, comprising the whole Corpus Lysiacum and four Platonic dialogues (Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophista and Politicus), which allowed for a detailed and insightful treatment of a large number of word order phenomena.