Aphaeresis

Attic more than any other dialect disliked the immediate succession of two vowel sounds in adjoining syllables. To avoid such succession, which often arose in the formation and inflection of words, various means were employed: contraction (48 ff.), when the vowels collided in the middle of a word; or, when the succession occurred between two words (hiatus), by crasis (62 ff.), elision (70 ff.), aphaeresis (76), or by affixing a movable consonant at the end of the former word (134).

Aphaeresis (ἀφᾳίρεσις taking away) is the elision of ε at the beginning of a word after a word ending in a long vowel or diphthong. This occurs only in poetry, and chiefly after μή not, ἤ or. Thus, μὴ ᾽νταῦθα, ἢ ᾽μέ, παρέξω ᾽μαυτόν, αὐτὴ ᾽ξῆλθεν. In some texts editors prefer to adopt crasis (62) or synizesis (60). α is rarely elided thus.