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The word perfect means "completed," or "finished." This Latin tense looks at the past as an old snapshot, a view of the some event now finished, beyond which we must now move. Vergil has one of the doomed Trojans speak as follows about the fall of Troy in the Aeneid,

The whole sense of this deceptively simple verse seems as complex as

(NOTA BENE: Don't go to this extreme in preparing for the AP Vergil exam. "We were Trojans; Troy was.")

For ideas of the past as a work in progress, what someone was doing, what was happening, Latin uses the imperfect tense, for which see the ImperfectTense page.

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