The article
English has a definite article, “the” and an indefinite article, “a” or “an.” Ancient Greek has only one article, and its uses are both straightforward and subtle.
Some uses of the article
Like the English definite article, the ancient Greek article may modify its noun by making it definite or particular: ἡ οἰκία “the house.” If indicated by the context, the specificity that the article indicates can convey the idea of possession: ὁ ἀνὴρ ἐκ τῆς οἰκίας ἦλθεν, “The man went out of his house.”
Differently from English, the article may be used to denote a general class or an abstract idea. οἱ ἄνθρωποι can mean “people” or “humans” in general. ἡ δημοκρατία can mean the abstract idea “democracy.”
Also differently from English, the article is frequently used with a proper noun. The city of Athens is named αἱ Ἀθῆναι. (Like many cities, the name of Athens was grammatically plural: αἱ is the feminine nominative singular form of the article.) The murdered adulterer in Lysias 1 can be referred to as ὁ Ἐρατοσθένης, “Eratosthenes.”
The article has “noun-making” powers: the article can be used with another part of speech, such as infinitives, participles, adjectives, and even particles, to create nouns or “substantives.” For example, Greek can use the article with the adverb νῦν “now” to create a phrase like οἱ νῦν (“the now ones”) to mean “people of today”.
The article and attributive and predicate positions
Nouns can be modified in several ways, including by adjectives (“the small house”) and by other nouns (“the man’s house”). In ancient Greek, the article plays a crucial role in connecting these modifiers to the noun they modify.
When a modifying word or phrase is connected to the noun it describes by the article, we call that the attributive position. When the modifier is not connected to its noun by an article, we call that the predicate position. The terms “attributive” and “predicate” summarize the difference in meaning between the two positions. When a word or phrase is in attributive position, it functions as an attribute of the noun; that is, it describes or qualifies the noun within a noun phrase. The grammatical term predicate refers to the part of a clause that contains a verb and states something about the subject. Compare these examples in English:
The tall woman went to the market.
The adjective “tall” is in the attributive position, and is part of a noun phrase, “the tall woman.” The entire noun phrase is the subject of the sentence, but if we dropped the adjective, the sentence would still make sense (alhtough we would have a less precise description of the subject): “The woman went to the market.”
The woman is tall.
Here, the adjective “tall” is in the predicate position. Together with the linking verb is, it makes a statement about the subject (“The woman”). The complete predicate “is tall” is an essential part of the sentence; dropping the adjective from the predicate completely alters the meaning of the sentence (“The woman is.”) We will look more closely at the meaning of the predicate position when we learn about adjectives.
The nominative and genitive forms of the article
In the following section, we’ll see how to describe one noun with a second noun using the genitive case. Memorize the nominative and genitive forms of the article so that you can recognize whether or not nouns in the genitive case are in attributive position.
| Case | Masculine singular | Feminine singular | Neuter singular | Masculine plural | Feminine plural | Neuter plural |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | ὁ | ἡ | τό | οἱ | αἱ | τά |
| Genitive | τοῦ | τῆς | τοῦ | τῶν | τῶν | τῶν |