The tenses in Greek express kind of action as well as time of action. They show the kind of action in all the moods, including the indicative, and in the participle, but the time of an action they show only in the indicative mood, and in the optative, infinitive, and participle in indirect discourse when these forms of the verb represent the indicative of the direct statement. And so the kind of action is indicated by every verb-form we meet, no matter what the mood may be. Nevertheless, because in modern languages we are accustomed to associate with tense the idea of time and to think of the time of an action first whenever tense comes up for consideration, we are prone to give more thought and attention to the time-value of a tense than to the part it plays in showing whether the act it denotes is a simple, a durative, or a completed act.