first freely pursue (μνάομαι) beings. He does so by removing the concealment and thus letting the un-concealed show itself. Beings show themselves first by being un-concealed, because concealedness surrounds those who have been transposed back into the here, as a consequence of the draught they had to take from the river in the λήθη-place. The μῦθος understands the necessity of ἀλήθεια and its essential relatedness to λήθη, as the ground preceding it, on the basis of the essential provenance and destiny of man. This emphatic reference to man already indicates a transformation of the basic position of thinking among the Greeks. This transformation signifies the inception of metaphysics. The history of the Greeks thus heads toward the completion of its essential possibility. Λήθη will no longer be experienced as a pure event but will be thought on the basis of the comportment of man in the sense of the later "forgetting."
But if λήθη, no matter how conceived, is originally the counter-essence to ἀλήθεια, and if to λήθη as withdrawing concealment there corresponds a losing in the sense of forgetting, then a keeping and preserving must also originally stand in a correspondence to ἀλήθεια. Where ἀλήθεια comes to presence there holds sway a keeping of that which is saved from loss. Unconcealedness and keeping, ἀλήθεια and μέμνημαι, come to presence together. And this original belonging together of both, precisely as primordial, must also possess the inconspicuous character of what, like a source, comes to presence out of itself in its essence. Indeed there is testimony to this. We have in mind a place in Homer, Iliad, XXIII, 358ff. Achilles orders Phoenix, at the battle of the chariots, ὡς μεμνέῳτο δρόμους καὶ ἀληθείην ἀποείποι, "to keep the course in view and accordingly to bring to word the unconcealed."
Let it be noted parenthetically that ἀλήθεια and ἔπος—unconcealedness and word—are again mentioned together.