9.3 Agreement

So far, we have concentrated on verbs with personal pronouns as subjects (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, etc.). A more common scenario, especially in the descriptive prose of historians such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, is for the subject to be a person or a thing, such as ‘Themistocles’, ‘Pericles’ or ‘the army’. In this situation, the third person forms of the verb are used. If the noun is singular, the verb form is the third person singular. If the noun is plural, the third person plural form of the verb is used.

This is the grammatical concept of agreement. A singular noun is accompanied by a third person singular verb; a plural noun by a third person plural verb.