Among modern scholars of ancient Greek it is almost universally accepted that the historical present is only used for events and not for states and activities. A survey of the extant complete tragedies shows that this view is untenable: there are passages where static verbs like κεῖμαι ‘lie’ and εὕδω ‘sleep’ are used in the historical present and where the historical present describes a state or activity which is extended in time. On the one hand this shows that punctuality or (...) decisiveness cannot be regarded as the basic function of the historical present; on the other it leads to new interpretations of a number of passages in Greek tragedy. (shrink)

This paper discusses the distinction between the aorist and the imperfect in ancient Greek in terms of the temporality of classicism and "fame." The aorist, in focusing on its action's concrete results, can become a link between an achievement and its reception in the future: in the third grammatical person, it represents the voice of the reader who asserts the subject's accomplishment. Imperfects, by contrast, locate an event simply in the past. The article argues that Thucydides exploits to the full (...) the possibilities of this opposition and ends with a discussion of the ancient meaning of the term a-oristos, which has been lost in modern Greek grammar. (shrink)