the.com/pathos

means The quality in speech, writing, or art that stirs pity, sorrow, or deep feeling in an audience.

from From Greek pathos, meaning 'suffering,' 'experience,' or 'emotion' — rooted in the verb paschein, 'to suffer' or 'to undergo.' Aristotle enshrined it as one of his three pillars of persuasion alongside ethos and logos, treating appeal to emotion as a legitimate partner to credibility and logic. The same Greek root gives English a whole family of feeling-words: sympathy, empathy, apathy, and pathetic all trace back to it.