H. P. Grice on Varro's tripartite "praeteritum-praesens-futurum"

Consider Varro. In “De lingua Romana,” he was the first to exploit the two axes, aspectual and temporal, which appear in the Grecian texts. His presentation of the verbal system is based on an aspectual binary opposition, “infectum”/“perfectum” (cf. 10.48), built on the semantic opposition between the unachieved (“infectum”) and the achieved (“perfectum”). Moreover, this presentation is based on the properly temporal tripartite classification “praeteritum/praesens/futurum” (in that order, that is, along an axis oriented from the past toward the future), in which each term is a participle of the tense it is supposed to represent (praeteritum: past participle of praeterire, “pass before, flow away”; praesens: present participle of praeesse, “to be at the head of,” whence “to be there personally, to attend”; futurum: future participle of esse, “to be”).