The plot is the same but the story is not. And just as in the original she is granted her wish to the cruel, cruel letter: he lives forever but does not stay young forever. As in the original, Eos falls in love with him (despite Aphrodite’s curse which would never let her find romantic happiness), they get married, and she goes to Zeus to request that Tithonus live forever. Take Fry’s version of Eos (the Titan of the dawn) and Tithonus, her mortal lover, for example.
Mythos avoids the didactic elements which constitute religious teachings, like the plague. The same goes for Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Prometheus and the various other gods, titans, nymphs, and humans as he goes about compiling and retelling the tales from early Greek mythology, starting with the creation of the universe and going through to the end of the Golden Age. In Fry’s mind Zeus is not so much a deity as he is a compelling character. Fry’s approach is historical and educational to a degree (thanks to pithy footnotes, but more on its narrative style later) but mostly fictional in the way it treats its source material as a collection of stories above all else. The word pathos is Greek itself and translates to “suffering” or “experience.” While it’s true that every story should have a strong pathetic element, it’s of particular interest as a means of framing Greek mythology since its contemporary presence largely depends on history books, educational textbooks, and YA fantasy books (the Percy Jackson series, for example).
I certainly never considered that it might be something a fiction author would use as a guiding light, as Fry does with his retelling of Greek mythology in Mythos (2017).
The concept was introduced to me (along with its siblings, ethos and logos) as a rhetorical strategy when I was a junior in high school and I haven’t thought of it much since then.
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