He recounts how Eos, choosing him to be her lover, had filled him with so much pride that he had seemed "To his great heart none other than a God!" (14). Confronted with old age and its attendant pains, he meditates upon death and mortality, and mourns the fact that death cannot release him from his misery. The poem begins with Tithonus speaking to Eos "at the quiet limit of the world" (line 7) where he lives with her. It was finally published by Tennyson in an anthology in the Enoch Arden volume in 1864. It was published in the February edition. When William Makepeace Thackeray asked him for a submission to the Cornhill Magazine to be issued in January 1860 which he was editing, Tennyson made some substantial revisions to the text of the poem and submitted it under the title "Tithonus". The original version of the poem, named "Tithon", was written in 1833 shortly after Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam's death but was not published. In this Aphrodite briefly tells of Eos's foolishness in neglecting to ask Zeus for immortal youth for Tithonus along with his immortality. The main classical source that Tennyson draws upon is from the story of Aphrodite's relationship with Anchises in the ancient Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. But since he is immortal, he cannot die and is destined to live forever, growing older and older with each passing day. Wasted and withered, Tithonus is reduced to a mere shadow of himself. As time wears on, age catches up with him. In the poem, Tithonus asks Eos for the gift of immortality, which she readily grants him, but forgets to ask for eternal youth along with it.
In the poem however, it is Eos, and not Zeus, who grants Tithonus immortality. In later tellings, Eos eventually turned him into a cricket to relieve him of such an existence. Tithonus indeed lived forever but grew ever older. When Zeus stole Ganymede from her to be his cup-bearer, as a repayment, Eos asked for Tithonus to be made immortal, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, abducted Ganymede and Tithonus from the royal house of Troy to be her consorts. In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a Trojan by birth, the son of King Laomedon of Troy by a water nymph named Strymo ("harsh"). Aurora was the Roman equivalent of Eos and often substitutes for her as Tithonus's consort.
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