The optative mood in Greek is found in four different tenses (present, aorist, perfect and future) and in all three voices (active, middle and passive).
It has multiple uses: Post-Homeric Greek is similar to many languages in its use of a "fake past" for contrary-to-fact clauses, e.g., "if dogs had hands".
It is sometimes preceded by εἴθε (eíthe) or εἰ γάρ (ei gár) "if only":[6] A wish is not always expressed in Ancient Greek by an optative mood.
If the wish is for the present or past, the imperfect indicative or aorist indicative is used:[8] In the New Testament, the volitive optative is often used in formal benedictions and prayers, for example:[10] It can also be used for wishes, as in this example from Luke's Gospel: The potential optative expresses something that would happen in a hypothetical situation in the future.
The following example, which uses the perfect optative, is similar: A conditional clause of the type "if by chance it happens" (made with ἐάν (eán) + the subjunctive) becomes "if by chance it might happen" (εἰ (ei) + the optative) in past time, as in this example from the New Testament, which looks forward prospectively to a potential situation which might occur in the future relative to the main verb: In classical writers, the optative is frequently used in indefinite clauses in past time of the type introduced by the equivalent of words such as "whenever", "if ever", "wherever", "whatever" and so on, referring to repeated events in the past.
In such clauses, when alternatives exist, the longer form of the conjunction (e.g. ὁπότε (hopóte) "whenever" rather than ὅτε (hóte) "when") is preferred.
[44] In the New Testament the optative mood in indirect speech is found only in Luke and Acts (apart from one example in John 13:24, where the text is disputed), and it seems often to be used in indirect questions where there is an element of potentiality,[45] for example: Homer uses the optative to express contrary-to-fact suppositions when they are imagined to occur in the present: Later dialects shifted to expressing such things using a past tense in the indicative.