Greek aorist: recognising the verb stem in Year 2

It is the end of September 2026. In Year 2 of the Italian classical high school (called V ginnasio), the teacher has just introduced — or is about to introduce — the aorist. After a whole year spent with the present and the imperfect, it is the first tense that really changes its stem, not just its ending. The test or the first translation that contains it usually falls between the end of October and mid-November, five to seven weeks from now: enough time to get there prepared, and very little if you only find out the day before that the aorist of λαμβάνω is ἔλαβον and not “λαμβάνησα” or something like it.

What the aorist really is (and why “past tense” is not enough)

The first misunderstanding to clear away is to call the aorist simply “the past tense of Greek”, as if it were the counterpart of the Latin perfect. That is only half true. Outside the indicative mood — participle, infinitive, subjunctive, optative — the aorist carries no information about time: it carries only aspect, that is, it shows an action seen as a single point, complete in itself, without duration — as opposed to the present, which sees the action as it unfolds. An aorist participle is not “a participle in the past”: it is a participle that presents the action as a point, regardless of when it happens in relation to the main verb (more on this below, in the typical mistakes).

Only in the indicative mood does the aorist add the temporal value of past as well, and there the English translation moves between the simple past and the present perfect depending on the context: ἔλυσα can be rendered “I released” or “I have released”, without Greek separating the two cases the way English does.

What the syllabus asks from now to November

The Year 2 block covers, in order, the first, second and third aorist in the indicative (and then in the other moods), and later the passive aorist and the future. It is a dense syllabus, but it has a logic: first you learn to recognise the type of aorist of each verb — because as a rule each has only one — then you move on to conjugating it in full. The critical point, the one on which most marks are lost in the first tests, is all here: going back from the present to the aorist stem, or the other way round, from the aorist met in a text to the present you have to look up in the dictionary. You need one learnt paradigm for each of the 100-150 most frequent irregular verbs: it cannot be invented, it has to be learnt.

First aorist (sigmatic): λύω → ἔλυσα

This is the most regular type and the starting point. To the verb stem you add a σ, then the secondary endings:

The problem arises when the verb stem ends in a stop consonant, because that consonant and the σ merge according to fixed rules:

• velar (κ, γ, χ) + σ → ξ: φυλάττω (stem φυλακ-, to guard) → ἐφύλαξα, διώκω (stem διωκ-, to pursue) → ἐδίωξα;
• labial (π, β, φ) + σ → ψ: γράφω (stem γραφ-, to write) → ἔγραψα, πέμπω (stem πεμπ-, to send) → ἔπεμψα;
• dental (τ, δ, θ) + σ → plain σ (the dental drops before σ): πείθω (stem πειθ-, to persuade) → ἔπεισα, not “ἔπειθσα”.

Another important class is that of verbs with a stem in a liquid or nasal (λ, ρ, μ, ν): here the σ of the first aorist drops out entirely, and to compensate the vowel of the stem lengthens. This is the asigmatic first aorist, but it is still “first” because it follows the endings of the sigmatic aorist, not those of the second:

• μένω (stem μεν-, to stay) → ἔμεινα (ε lengthens to ει);
• ἀγγέλλω (stem ἀγγελ-, to announce) → ἤγγειλα (ε lengthens to ει, and with the temporal augment ἀ- becomes ἠ-, see below).

Second aorist (thematic): λαμβάνω → ἔλαβον

The second aorist adds no consonant: it changes the vowel grade of the stem, usually going from a stem with a diphthong or a long vowel to a simpler stem, and it uses the same endings as the active imperfect:

The examples to fix first: λείπω → ἔλιπον (ει → ι), λαμβάνω → ἔλαβον, βάλλω → ἔβαλον. In all three the present has one more suffix or vowel than the bare stem, which the aorist reveals.

One part of the Year 2 syllabus that has to be learnt by heart, without looking for a logic that is not there, is the suppletive verbs: the present and the aorist come from two different roots, exactly as in English go and went come from two different roots. The most frequent cases in the first texts:

• ὁράω (to see) → εἶδον;
• λέγω (to say) → εἶπον;
• φέρω (to carry) → ἤνεγκα (or ἤνεγκον, an older alternative form);
• ἔρχομαι (to go, to come) → ἦλθον;
• ἐσθίω (to eat) → ἔφαγον.

Here the dictionary is indispensable: no rule leads from φέρω to ἤνεγκα, and in fact every good dictionary lists these forms under the entry for the present.

Third aorist (athematic or root): βαίνω → ἔβην

The smallest group, typical of a few very frequent verbs, attaches the endings directly to the bare stem, with no thematic linking vowel — the same mechanism as εἰμί in the present:

• βαίνω (to go) → ἔβην (I went), ἔβης, ἔβη, ἔβημεν, ἔβητε, ἔβησαν;
• γιγνώσκω (to know) → ἔγνων;
• ἵστημι (to set, to place — in the intransitive aorist “to stand”) → ἔστην.

These three verbs come back so often in the first texts that it is worth learning them by heart as a single block, even before you see the full conjugation in lessons.

The three types, in one table

The augment and its cases

Every indicative aorist — like the imperfect — carries the augment at the start, the written sign that marks the past:

• syllabic: if the verb begins with a consonant, an ε- is added in front: λύω → ἔλυσα;
• temporal: if the verb begins with a vowel, that vowel lengthens (α, ε → η; ο → ω; ι, υ stay the same but become long in quantity): ἀγγέλλω → ἠγγειλα;
• in compounds, the augment does not go in front of the preverb but between the preverb and the verb, and if the preverb ends in a vowel this often drops: ἀπο-βαίνω (to go away) → aorist ἀπ-έβην, not “ἐαποβην”.

Forgetting this third rule — putting the augment in front of the preverb instead of after it — is one of the most frequent mistakes in the first translations with compound verbs, and we come back to it below.

From the aorist to the lemma: how to use the dictionary

The method for working back to the present you have to look up, when you meet an aorist form in a text, is always the same:

1. Remove the augment, syllabic or temporal, to isolate the stem.
2. Recognise the type: is there a σ after the stem (first)? Has the vowel grade changed (second)? Is it attached without a thematic vowel (third)?
3. Look up the present in the dictionary starting from the stem you have isolated — not from the aorist form, which almost no dictionary lists as an entry of its own.
4. If the stem leads you nowhere, it is almost certainly a suppletive: dictionaries such as Rocci or the GI always give, inside the entry for the present, the irregular forms of the aorist, future and perfect — that is where to look for them, not as a separate entry.

Three practice sentences, with full analysis

Sentences made up for practice, not taken from an author — useful only to fix the procedure.

1. Ὁ στρατηγὸς τοὺς πολεμίους ἔλιπεν ἐν τῷ πεδίῳ.

ἔλιπεν: syllabic augment ἐ-, stem λιπ- (a reduced grade compared with the present λειπ-), 3rd person singular ending -εν → second aorist of λείπω, “to leave”. Translation: The general left the enemies on the plain.

2. Οἱ παῖδες τὸν λόγον τοῦ διδασκάλου ἤκουσαν.

ἤκουσαν: temporal augment (ἀ- → ἠ-, because ἀκούω begins with the short vowel α), σ before the ending -αν → first sigmatic aorist of ἀκούω, “to listen, to hear”. Translation: The boys listened to the teacher’s speech.

3. Οἱ Ἕλληνες εἰς τὴν πόλιν ἦλθον καὶ τὸν βασιλέα εἶδον.

ἦλθον: temporal augment ἐ- → ἠ-, a stem entirely different from the present ἔρχομαι → suppletive second aorist, lemma to look up ἔρχομαι, not “ἦλθω”. εἶδον: second aorist with the augment fused with the stem (from an ancient *ἐ-ϝιδον, stem ἰδ-), also suppletive → lemma ὁράω, “to see”. Translation: The Greeks came to the city and saw the king.

An honest note: our practice tests for high school cover maths and physics, not yet Greek. If in parallel you have a maths test, there you will find a practice test per topic: the correct answer to every question is free, and the guided solution is unlocked with the first lesson.

The mistakes that come back in every test

• Confusing the second aorist and the imperfect: ἔλιπον (aorist, “I left”) against ἔλειπον (imperfect, “I was leaving”) are two different forms of the same verb, told apart only by the vowel of the stem (ι against ει) — a detail you notice only if you look for it on purpose.
• Forgetting the augment in compounds, or putting it in the wrong place: ἀπέβην, not “ἐαποβην” or “ἀποέβην”.
• Always translating the aorist participle as “prior to” the main verb. It is often true — and it is the default reading to teach — but the aorist participle expresses punctual aspect, not relative time in the strict sense: in most cases it coincides with an action completed before that of the main verb, but in some uses (the aorist participle called “coincident”) it describes the same action as the main verb seen from its result, not an earlier action. It is a practical rule to begin with, not an absolute law.

How we work on this, in lessons

With students meeting the aorist for the first time we work on two parallel tracks: on one side, memorising the irregular paradigms in blocks — ten to fifteen verbs a week, not all together — and on the other, the daily exercise of “go back to the present” on forms met in the real texts set at school, because that is the task the test really asks for. We use the same approach by topic — recognise the structure before translating — also for Year 2 Latin, where the problem is no longer morphology but the analysis of the sentence: two different languages, the same underlying method. If you still have gaps in the Year 1 morphology, you can restart from the post on the alphabet, accents and the first Greek declension, and for the Latin of the same year from the post on the third declension.

The full picture of the path in Latin and Greek is on the Latin page, which covers both classical languages.

If the aorist is already a fixed worry or at home you do not know where to restart from, begin with a free introductory call: we look together at the text you are working on and we tell you honestly how many lessons you need to get to the first test calmly.