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LESSON 2 - First Part / Second Part
ACHILLES' GRIEF - From Homer's Iliad 

by George Valsamis

The verb  κεῖμαι

 

Κεῖμαι is the first person, singular, present perfect form of a verb belonging to an unknown present. This "combination" of simple present and present perfect adds to the meaning the nuance of a continuously achieved finitude - an action always the same and yet always new.

Κεῖται is the third person = he, Patroclus, lies.

If you place both forms side by side you can recognise a stem and an ending: κεῖ-μ-αι, κεῖ-τ-αι. What can these tell you about a verb?

The root (not always equal with the stem) of a Verb can help you identify a verb's origin and its connections with other words belonging to the same root. The root can be a gate to the primary meaning of a verb.

(We shall see this later using κεῖμαι. For the moment remember that the stem is the beginning of the word, before the addition of suffixes. Sometimes root and stem are equal. Other times a root produces several stems, so that it is possible for a root to have only the first letter identical with the first letter of a word's stem.)

The ending of a verb reveals the person (first, second or third), number (singular, dual or plural), voice (active, middle or passive), mode (indicative, subjunctive, etc).

 

The type of κεῖμαι forms the first person's ending in -μ-αι, and the third person's ending in -τ-αι. Notice μ and τ. The former belongs to the first person, the latter to the third person. Now, if you see in a text some other verb e.g. λύομαι, even if you don't know what it means, you can recognise the root (λυ) and you can infer by the ending, that it is a middle voice verb, first person.

 

Κεῖμαι is based, as we saw, on root √ΚΕΙ. This root also produced words like κείω (I want to sleep), κοίτη (sleeping bed, the bed of a river), κοιτίς (box, basket), κοιμάω (I help someone go to sleep), κοιμῶμαι (I'm sleeping, I'm inactive), κώμη (village), ὠκεανός (ocean), κειμήλιον (heirloom), κείμενον (a stored thing, an available thing, a defined thing, a valid rule, a text).

 

If Homer wanted to say "Patroclus is dead" or "has fallen", he could have done so, he had the words! But he said κεῖται, which means "he was standing, he was fighting, he was hit, he died, he fell and now κεῖται".

Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/lessons/lesson2.asp?pg=11