Introduction to Ancient Greek Second Aorist Middle Indicative Verbs
Ancient Greek second aorist tense, middle voice, indicative mood verbs describe (or indicate!) actions that were performed in the past by the subject of the sentence. The action that occurred must have been a discrete event and not an ongoing process.
(The second aorist tense is sometimes also referred to as the strong aorist.)
At first glance, the second aorist appears very similar to the imperfect tense (having the same augment and verb endings). However, second aorist verbs are distinguishable from imperfect verbs in that they have unique aorist verb stems which differ from their present-tense verb stems.
(In this, they are somewhat analogous to irregular verbs in English.)
The middle voice of this verb form differs from the active voice in that sometimes the subject of the sentence is also the object (eg: "I stopped myself"). Or, sometimes the middle voice denotes reciprocal action: "The soldier fought the enemy" (and the enemy fought back). The middle voice is also used for autonomic actions, such as digesting food or hearing noise. (For a more in-depth discussion, see Carl W. Conrad's page covering Ancient Greek middle voice verbs on the Washington University At St. Louis' website).
Typically, 2nd aorist middle indicative verbs in Ancient Greek are composed of a verb stem beginning with an ε- augment and ending with the following: -ομην, -ου, -ετο, -ομεθα, -εσθε or -οντο. Of course, the augments and verb-endings will be modified according to the Ancient Greek contraction rules; click the yellow grammar review table button for further details.
This test does not include diacritical accentation.
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