Should the phrase "I often saw" use the imperfect or the aorist in Greek?

Question

I'm translating a sentence in my textbook from English to Greek, and that sentence uses the phrase I often saw. For copyright reasons, I'm going to create a new sentence using this phrase.

On this road, I often saw the children who had been hurt by him.

My best translation would be,

Ἐν ταυτῃ τῃ ὁδῳ, τα τεκνα αὐτῳ βεβλαμμενα πολλακις εἰδον (ἑωρων).

In this translation, I used the aorist form of the verb (and also put the imperfect in parentheses). I used the perfect passive participle βεβλαμμενα to translate the relative clause.

When it comes to the main verb, I saw, I'm unsure of whether to use the aorist or the imperfect. The phrase I often saw does seem to have the flavor of I used to see, which would be an example of the imperfect, but I'm not sure if this comparison is correct. As a followup question, is the phrase I often saw enough context for deciding between the aorist and the imperfect, or do you have to consider the entire sentence to decide? I would be interested to know whether adverbs like πολλακις typically point to one or the other.

Answer 1

This is an interesting question. A priori, one would think the imperfect would be the obvious choice here, as it's the tense generally used to denote repeated action, but actual Greek usage doesn't seem to bear that out.

I searched the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for uses of πολλάκις in Plato (as being a typical Attic author). Out of the first 50 hits, I counted 10 where the verb was aorist vs. only one where it was imperfect. (The other hits used other tenses.) If this sample is representative, then the aorist is much more frequent than the imperfect with πολλάκις.

Semantically, this isn't actually too difficult to understand: it seems that each individual event of "seeing" (or whatever the verb is) is conceived of as separate and complete, and the choice of the aorist signals this, rather than the entire series of events being regarded as a unit, which would presumably lead to the imperfect.