Eros fire.” (Nonnus, "Dionysiaca" 48. 470 ff – a Greek epic of the 5th century AD) The story of Eros and Psyche has a longstanding tradition as a folktale of the ancient Greco-Roman world long before it was committed to literature in Apuleius' Latin novel, "The Golden Ass". The novel itself is written in a picaresque Roman style, yet Psyche retains her Greek name. Eros and Aphrodite are called by their Latin names (Cupid and Venus), and Cupid is depicted as a young adult, rather than a child. The story tells of the struggle for love and trust between Eros and
433 Eros into an Earth-crosser within as short an interval as two million years, and has a roughly 50% chance of doing so over a time scale of 10–10 years. It is a potential Earth impactor, about five times larger than the impactor that created Chicxulub crater and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Eros is named after the Greek god of love, Erōs. It is pronounced or sometimes . The rarely used adjectival form of the name is "Erotian" . Eros is also the first masculine name for an asteroid. The NEAR Shoemaker probe visited Eros twice, first with a