218 On certain Tenses she had added any one^ she would probably have said. Have you ever levied ? Did yoit ever love ? would indeed have been perfectly appropriate : but so graceful a speaker could hardly have askt. Have you ever loved any one? though even if it were worded in this way the question would still refer to the feelings of Euthymedes, not to the object of them. Thus one often says, / have just eaten my dinner : but this is merely equivalent to / have just dined; and he who says it is speak- ing with reference to himself, not to the dinner. On the other hand the dandy, who was askt whether he never ate pease, answered, Why^ yes ma'ams I believe I did once eat a pea. I do not mean to say that one can never use the per- fect objectively, but that one has much more frequent need to use it subjectively : and this may enable us to understand why so many of the Greek prefects, even when they come from transitive verbs, are intransitive, and why most of those in common use are so, to whichever form they belong: for instance eouca^ f3ef3rjKa^ TeOvrjKa^ apapa^ SeSia. 'OXwXa oc- curs a hundred times for once that we meet with oXwXeKai ireTTOiOa^ Treirpa'ya are at least twenty times as common as TreTret/ca, TreV^a^a. But there is no valid reason whatsoever for assigning the subjective perfects to the middle voice when they belong to the one form, any more than when they are of the other. The middle voice has no greater claim upon lelia than it has upon ceSoLKa or e^e^cra, no greater upon Trewpaya than upon irpaTTw when it is used intransitively, no greater upon cLKrjKoa than upon tjicovaa or olkovco. It must be allowed that some of the tenses which belong more appropriately to the middle voice, have often a corresponding signification: thus the future of the last-mentioned verb is aKovao/uLai. But in like manner we meet with a large number of verbs, of which there is a tolerably long list in Buttmann's Grammar, Vol. II. p. 52, which have a passive or middle form of the future answering to an active present. In fact this was one of the artifices to which the genius of the Greek language had recourse, to avoid speaking presumptuously of the future : for there is an awful, irrepressible, and almost instinctive con- sciousness of the uncertainty of the future, and of our own powerlessness over it, which in all cultivated languages has silently and imperceptibly modified the modes of expression
