During last decades, many linguistic researchers have praised the grammatical ideas of Eduardo Benot (1822-1907) because of their modernity and have considered him to be a forerunner of linguistic theories and grammatical concepts; at the same time, they regret the oblivion of Benot’s grammatical work. Some of them have also suggested that the course of Spanish grammatical studies would have been different if Spanish grammarians had followed Benot’s proposals. This work compares Benot’s thinking about the main syntactic unit, the syntactic functions and the role of the verb in that unit with the approach to these questions in some influential subsequent Spanish grammars and with present days approaches that represent some advances in syntactic studies. The paper also includes a final reflection on possible causes of the oblivion of Benot’s grammatical ideas.