Infinitive (Ancient Greek)

The Ancient Greek infinitive is a non-finite verb form, sometimes called a verb mood, with no endings for person or number, but it is (unlike in Modern English) inflected for tense and voice (for a general introduction in the grammatical formation and the morphology of the Ancient Greek infinitive see here and for further information see these tables).

It is used mainly to express acts, situations and in general "states of affairs"^[1] that are depended on another verb form, usually a finite one.

It is a non declinable nominal verb form equivalent to a noun, and expresses the verbal notion abstractly; used as a noun in its main uses, it has many properties of it, as it will be seen below, yet it differs from it in some respects:^[2]

(a) When used with no article, and in its major uses (subject/object), it can normally only be equivalent to either a nominative or an accusative case; used with the article, it may be in any case (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative).

(b) It shows morphological formation according to aspect, voice (active, middle, passive) and tense (only the future infinitive).

(c) It retains some verbal syntactic features: it governs the same oblique case (its object) as the verb to which it belongs, and it may have a subject of its own, in accusative case (See the section accusative and infinitive below).

(d) It is modified by adverbials and not by adjectives.