The Imperfect and the Aorist in Greek

Miller surveys the explanations given by other grammarians for the Greek Aorist and Imperfect tenses. These two tenses function as a simple past (I ran, I ate) for the Aorist and a past state (I was walking, the situation persisted) for the Imperfect. The details are less simple, of course, and this essay provides an overview of the use of these workhorse tenses in Greek prose that is both illuminating to the advanced reader of Ancient Greek and helpful to the beginning student struggling to differentiate between these two tenses whose use is quite unlike the English past tenses.