Verb – Aorist -μι

These verbs are best translated into English with the simple present, but this is a fact about English rather than Greek. The event of the sun rising and drying grass begins in the past, continues into the present, and will even extend further into the future. There is no logical reason why a past tense could not be used to describe such a situation as long as that particular past tense was not necessarily confined to describing situations that only occurred in the past and not in the present. This data from Greek suggests that the Aorist describes past situations that may continue into the present.

So why would the Aorist be used here? Each of these events has a natural endpoint. The sun rises to a point where we can say it has risen; a flower falls all the way to the ground; beauty perishes to the point where it is no longer visible. Previously, we described the Aorist as including the endpoint of the event, and we called this perfective aspect. This is, I suggest, why the Aorist is used here for these kinds of generic statements. The Aorist says that each time one of these events occurs, it reaches its endpoint. As a past tense, the Aorist says that these generic events occurred in the past; nothing is said about whether they continue into the present and future, but we infer that they do.