The Latin "perfect" forms are a combination of two different tense-aspect combinations: past aoristic ("I ate"), and present perfective ("I have eaten"). The two are generally indistinguishable, but present perfective counts as "primary" in the sequence of tenses, and past aoristic counts as "secondary".
I'm curious: did pre-modern grammarians ever comment on this distinction, or give different names to the two uses?
