Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Maia.
The gallery
Hermes and Maia (Attic red-figure belly-amphora)
Attributed to the Nikoxenos Painter, c. 500 BC
This detail from an Attic red-figure belly-amphora, attributed to the Nikoxenos Painter and dated to around 500 BC, shows the nymph Maia standing beside her son Hermes amid an assembly of Olympian deities. Eldest of the Pleiades and daughter of the Titan Atlas, Maia bore Hermes to Zeus in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia; here the vase painter places mother and divine-messenger son together among the gods, a rare ancient image naming Maia in her own right rather than only as 'mother of Hermes.' The amphora is held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich (Inv. 2304).
Maia and Mercury (silver cup from the Berthouville Treasure)
Unknown (Gallo-Roman silversmith), Late 2nd century AD
A repoussé silver cup, dedicated to Mercury by the freedman Publius Aelius Eutychus at the end of the 2nd century AD and recovered as part of the Berthouville Treasure (found in Normandy in 1830), depicts Maia together with Mercury, the Roman counterpart of Hermes. The pairing reflects the enduring identification of Maia as the mother of the messenger god, a tradition in which the Greek Pleiad was also syncretized with a Roman goddess of growth who gave her name to the month of May. The cup is preserved in the Cabinet des médailles of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
In play
May
The month of May takes its name from Maia — the Pleiad mother of Hermes as the calendar's spring label in English and the Romance languages.
Maia
Maia remains the eldest Pleiad in star lore — the mountain nymph whose cluster still rises before dawn in the farming year.