through everything and (hence) in that way brings everything to perfection.
Parmenides is telling us about a goddess. The appearance of a "divine being" in the train of thought of a thinker strikes us as odd—because, on the one hand, in general a thinker is not supposed to proclaim the message of a divine revelation but is to assert on his own what he himself has questioned. And even when the thinker thinks about "the divine," as occurs in all "metaphysics," this thinking τὸ θεῖον (the divine) is, as Aristotle said, a thinking from "reason" and not a reiteration of propositions from the "belief" of a cult or a church. The appearance of a goddess in the didactic poem of Parmenides is, however, particularly disconcerting because it is the goddess "truth." For "the truth," just like "beauty," "freedom" or "justice," counts for us as something "universal," something extracted from the singular and the actual, from what is at any particular moment true, just, or beautiful and is therefore represented "abstractly," in a mere concept. To make of "the truth" a goddess amounts to turning the mere notion of something, namely the concept of the essence of truth, into a "personality."
b) Two directives from the translating word ἀλήθεια. The conflictual character of unconcealedness. Preliminary clarification of the essence of ἀλήθεια and of concealedness. Transporting and translating [Ubersetzen—Ubersetzen].
If we hear in an initial and vague way of the goddess "truth" in the "didactic poem" and infer that here the "abstract notion" "truth" is being "personified" in a divine figure, then we are posing therewith as ones who believe they know both what "the truth" is as well as what is the essence properly belonging to the divinity of the Greek gods.
But in fact we do not know anything about either. Even if we could suppose we were instructed about the essence of truth as the Greeks thought it by taking the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle as a norm, we would already be on a false track that will never, on its own, lead back to what the early thinkers experienced when they gave a name to that which we signify by "truth." If we asked ourselves off the top of our heads what precisely we think when we use the word "truth," we would very quickly run into a tangled manifold of "views" or, perhaps, a general perplexity What of course is more important than counting the divergent interpretations of truth and of its essence is the insight, bound to arise on such an occasion, that we have up to now never seriously and carefully reflected on what exactly it is we call "the