Aoristo e perfetto nel greco tardo-antico

The disappearance of the synthetic perfect is one of the most important changes affecting the Greek verbal system in the Roman and Late Antique Era. According to Chantraine’s 1926 theory, still considered valid by most scholars, the perfect and the aorist grew semantically and functionally closer and closer; when this process of convergence was completed, around the 1st or 2nd century AD, the perfect tense gradually disappeared. The quantitative analysis of the entire corpus of literary works from the 1st to the 5th century shows that forms of the perfect, far from disappearing, increase in frequency from the 1st to the 4th century AD (section 2)The qualitative and quantitative analysis of a sample of late-antique literary texts of middle/high stylistic register shows that the partial loss of semantic distinction between the two tenses does not lead to an overlap in usage. On the contrary, we find “suppletive” and “conversive” usages. In “suppletive” usages (section 3), affecting the verb γίγνομαι, perfect forms are used in the indicative, and aorist forms in the other moods. In “conversive” usages (section 4), occurring in a variety of verbs, perfect and aorist forms are coordinated syntactically, but the semantics of the first form affects that of the second form. These finds suggest the need for a revision of the interpretive models currently accepted