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.
Vulcan and Maia
Bartholomeus Spranger, c. 1575–1580
Spranger's Mannerist canvas in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, pairs Maia with Vulcan — the Roman forge-god beside the mother of Mercury. The painting folds the Greek Pleiad into Imperial allegory: Maia as growth and May, still recognisable as Hermes' mountain mother.
Relief of Maia and Mercury
Unknown (Gallo-Roman sculptor), Roman Imperial
A Gallo-Roman relief in the Musée gallo-romain of Lyon shows Maia with Mercury, mother and messenger side by side in provincial stone. The pairing carries the Cyllenian birth into the cult landscape of Roman Gaul — Maia as both Pleiad and local goddess of increase.
The Pleiades
Elihu Vedder, 1885
Vedder's American Symbolist painting gathers the seven star-sisters — Maia the eldest among them — as a drifting chorus of light. The Arcadian nymph who bore Hermes becomes one face in the cluster that still rises before dawn.
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.