Tithonus

British  

/ tɪˈθəʊnəs /

noun

1. Greek myth the son of Laomedon of Troy who was loved by the goddess Eos. She asked that he be made immortal but forgot to ask that he be made eternally young. When he aged she turned him into a grasshopper

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Example Sentences

This Tithonus, the husband of Aurora, the Goddess of the Dawn, was the father of her son, the dark-skinned prince Memnon of Ethiopia who was killed at Troy, fighting for the Trojans.

From Literature

Tithonus himself had a strange fate.

From Literature

Chaucer was around fifty when “The Merchant’s Tale” was conceived; Shakespeare either forty-one or forty-two when he wrote “King Lear,” Swift fifty-five or so when gleefully depicting the immortal but ailing Struldbruggs, and Tennyson a mere twenty-four when he began “Tithonus” and completed “Ulysses,” his great anthem to an aging but “hungry heart.”

From The New Yorker

When the Greek goddess Eos asked the gods to grant her mortal lover Tithonus eternal life, she neglected to add a necessary codicil to the celestial contract — that he have eternal youth as well.

From Los Angeles Times

So begins Tennyson’s haunting poem “Tithonus,” a meditation on death as part of the natural order of things.

From Washington Post