Pindar's seventh Olympic Ode, for it can clarify the Greek essence of λήθη in one important respect. Of course we must renounce listening to the poetic splendor of this Ode as a whole or even only of the part immediately concerning us.
b) Awe in Pindar, Olympic Ode VII, 48f.; 43ff.; and in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1267. Ἀρετή (resoluteness) as the disclosedness of man, determined on the basis of ἀλήθεια and ἀἰδώς.
The poet is telling the μῦθος of the colonization of the celebrated island of Rhodes. The colonists came without a source of gleaming fire and therefore had to set up a sacred place and have sacrifices without fire on the high point of the city "Lindos," i.e., on its ἀκρόπολις.
τεῦξαν δ᾽ ἀπύροις ἱεροῖς
ἄλσος ἐν ἀκροπόλει:1
It was surely not on account of arbitrary negligence that the colonists came without fire. Something must have occurred that was not due simply to them themselves, just as in general what man does and allows, what man experiences and is capable of, is determined by a properly determining essence. It is with a reference to this latter that the "myth" of the foundation of the city is introduced (a. a. O., 43ff.)
ἐν δ᾽ ἀρετὰν
ἔβαλεν καὶ χάρματ᾽ ἀνθρώποισι Προμαθέος Αἰδώς:
ἐπὶ μὰν βαίνει τε καὶ λάθας ἀτέκμαρτα νέφος,
καὶ παρέλκει πραγμάτων ὀρθὰν ὁδὸν
ἔξω φρενῶν.
"Awe thrusts up the flourishing of the essence and the joy disposing man to think ahead, but sometimes there comes over it the signless cloud of concealment, which withholds from action the straightforward way and places them outside what is thoughtfully disclosed."
These words provide a very beautiful poetic elucidation of the essence of λήθη. Here λάθα stands in opposition to αἰδώς. We translate by "awe." But that word is not meant to denote a "subjective" feeling or a "lived experience" of the human "subject." Αἰδώς, (awe) comes over man as what is determining, i.e. disposing. As is clear on the basis of the opposition to λάθα (concealment), awe determines ἀλήθεια. the unconcealed in its unconcealedness, in which the whole essence of man stands together with all human faculties. Αἰδώς, a fundamental word of Pindar's poetry and consequently a fundamental word
1 "They set up a sacred grove on the acropolis with fireless sacrifices"—Tr