Lexical usage

The macrorole of agent includes a whole range of semantic roles. The specific role in any given case depends on the governing noun. If the governing noun expresses a perception, emotion or mental activity, the semantic role is experiencer.

Syntactic usage

It is not always possible to tell unequivocally whether a genitive signals an agent or a patient:

• τὸ τοῦ ἐναντίου μῖσος ‘the hatred of/for the opponent’;
• ἡ τῆς μητρὸς ἀγάπη ‘the love of/for the mother’.

The same noun can govern a genitive of the agent and a genitive of the patient at the same time. In this case the two genitives are usually separated by the noun. Usually Greek will avoid confusion by using a preposition.

• τούτου γὰρ ἡ ἡγεμονία ἦν τῶν ὀπισθοφυλάκων λοχαγῶν (Xenophon, Anabasis 4.7.8) ‘of him [= of Nicias] was the authority over the spearmen’;
• τήν γε τῶν ἐμφρόνων ζήτησιν τοῦ μέλλοντος (Plato, Phaedrus 244c) ‘the search of the prudent for the future'.

Varia

This genitive is traditionally called the subjective genitive because the content of these noun phrases can be converted into a sentence in which the original genitive becomes the subject: ἡ μάχη τῶν στρατιωτῶν 'the fight of the soldiers' - οἱ στρατιῶται μάχονται ‘the soldiers fight’. In reality the subjective nominative and genitive share a semantic role, not a syntactic function.