Pathos

Pathos is "a Greek term referring to appeal to the emotions and ideals of the audience," from the Ancient Greek páthos, "suffering or experience." It is one of the three classical modes of persuasion, alongside ethos and logos: Aristotle's Rhetoric treats it as "awakening emotion (pathos) in the audience so as to induce them to make the judgment desired," and insists it be paired with a credible ethos. On the appeal to pity the Rhetorica ad Herennium supplies the craft warning: stir it briefly, for "nothing dries more quickly than a tear." Beyond rhetoric, the term is also used in literature, film and other narrative art.

For a novelist, pathos names the feeling a scene is built to produce, and the classical warning holds at book length: sorrow pressed too long numbs. Its accidental collapse is bathos, and its planned, earned release is catharsis.