The composition textbook by Lewis and Styler says that for saying how old someone is, the idiom (Attic, I suppose) is δέκα ἔτη γεγονώς, using the accusative for duration. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon says that the perfect of this verb has a different sense than you might guess, meaning to live or exist, i.e., I guess this would literally translate as “10 years existing.” I suppose the meaning of the perfect here is that the existence has been accomplished.
Now there’s a recent book by George, Expressions of time in ancient Greece, and he discusses the construction for “ago,” which is (to me, surprisingly) rare in the classical authors he describes. The construction seems to be things like ἡμέραν πέμπτην for “four days ago.” That is, you use the singular accusative, and n+1 to say n ago. So basically “four days ago” is rendered as something like “on the fifth day [in the past],” the idea being that today is the first day, yesterday was the second day, and so on. (There is also a special -purpose word πέρυσι, last year, which is documented back to Mycenean!) So this would seem to be a lot like the familiar forward-counting of time where we get “on the seventh day he rested,” to mean that the rest day 6+1 was 6 steps in time later than the starting day.
In today’s culture, saying how old you are is one of the first things kids learn to do in their native languages, and it’s something I expect to be able to do if I’m learning a foreign language like Spanish. So all of this makes me wonder a couple of things. (1) Was it really a thing culturally, during the classical period, for Greeks to know their age in years? I’m suspicious that Lewis and Styler made this up or backported it from Koine. George says that the “ago” construction is so rare that you can count the examples on your fingers, and he never even mentions expressions for a person’s age. (2) If it was a thing, would δέκα ἔτη γεγονώς mean 10 years old, or would it mean 9 years old?
IIRC Chinese does express this in a way that differs by ±1 from English.
I can think of a couple of mentions of age that I’ve come across. The Apology’s “ἔτη γεγονὼς ἑβδομήκοντα” and also in Anabasis “οἱ εἰς τριάκοντα ἔτη γεγονότες,” and variations. I am sure others can think of more examples.
Aha, thanks, that’s interesting! It also occurred to me that the gospels give Jesus’s approximate age in years, but that would be koine, and the idiom seems to be different:
Right, I was just wondering whether this really has the implication that ages are off by one compared to English. For example, Lewis and Styler translate δέκα ἔτη γεγονώς as “10 years old.” But if this construction has the same semantics in this particular usage, then it seems to me that they’re wrong, and it actually means “9 years old.”
It also seems possible to me that this kind of accurate reckoning of birthdays was just not a thing culturally, or that if they really wanted to be precise they would use ἐνιαυτός rather than ἔτος. (Homer almost never uses ἐνιαυτόν except as the object of εἰς.) Maybe there are examples like a koine author talking about a yearling colt or a child dying of measles in the first year of life. If it follows the English semantics, and the language didn’t yet have μηδέν for “zero,” then you need some other idiom for expressing being less than 12 months old.
So my understanding is that 9-year-old in English is a precise term, meaning “past the 9th birthday.” δέκα ἔτη γεγονώς is imprecise, meaning (wordily) “he has lived a life ten years in extent.” Or he’s lived the bulk of 10 years. So someone from ~9.5 to ~10.5 maybe. (But that’s unwarranted precision.) That’s how I understand it anyway. The LSJ mentions that the ordinal usage appears with later authors.