the μῦθος of λήθη; no μῦθος is ever invented nor found by seeking. The legendary word is a response to the word of an appeal in which Being itself dispenses itself to man and therewith first indicates the paths a seeking might take within the sphere of what is disclosed in advance.
Certainly the time of Plato, four centuries later, is no longer the age of Homer. The ability, hence the inclination as well as the aptitude, to express the appeal of Being becomes more and more concerned with establishing something that has been attained in the meanwhile, namely a being-at-home in beings on the basis of what man has instituted by his own procedures. The legendary word is not weaker; but man's perception is more variegated and dispersed and hence too volatile to experience as present the simple, which comes into presence originarily and therefore constantly. In the final era of the completion of the Greek world, we recognize already the traces of the early form of that historical condition which then determines the epoch of modernity in the West. In this epoch, as a consequence of a peculiarly concealed incertitude, certitude in the sense of unconditional certainty counts as what is most valuable, and therefore ascertaining becomes the basic character of all comportment. Ascertaining is not a merely subsequent corroboration but is rather the aggressive making secure in advance for the sake of certitude. The content and the reality of everything objective has whatever validity it has as the inexhaustible occasion for objectivization in the sense of the certification of the content of world and "life." Procedural processes (τέχνη) and their modes dominate experience. A river no longer flows in the mysterious course of its windings and turnings along banks it itself has carved out, but it now only pushes its water to an "end" predirected to it without detours, between the uniform rails of cement walls, which are in no way banks. The fact that precisely at the time of Socrates and Plato the word τέχνη, which there surely still means something essentially different from technique in the sense of modern technology, is often used, and is already thought of, is a sign that procedural processes are lording it over experience. The ability to listen to legend becomes weaker and more withdrawn from its essence.
The legendary word of Homer has not faded away. The otherwise silent μῦθος of λήθη exists. Therefore even the Platonic μῦθος of λήθη is a remembering of, not merely a thinking "about," the λήθη Pindar and Hesiod mention. This remembering utterance of the μῦθος preserves the primordial unveiling of the essence of λήθη and at the same time helps us to think more attentively the domain in which Homer already mentions the counter-word to λήθη, ἀλήθεια.
In the penultimate book Ψ (XXIII) of the Iliad there is in verse 358ff. a passage referred to at the conclusion of the consideration of the oppositional character of the essence of ἀλήθεια. This song poetizes the