Calle de Eros

For the Greeks, Eros embodied the force that drives gods and mortals to unite. His name means desire, and under it love was imagined as a power older than the order of the world, able to move chaos toward life. He was pictured as a winged youth with a bow and two kinds of arrows: the golden ones kindle love, the leaden ones quench it. To him is attributed the falling in love of Psyche, a mortal who became his wife after a long cycle of trials. Rome renamed him Cupid and reduced him to the mischievous child of the prints. The calle de Eros runs through Legazpi, a district raised over former industrial and railway land in southern Madrid. No record survives of why the map brought the god of love here; the figure stands alone, bow in hand, giving its name to a street just over four hundred meters long.