Maia

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Above the upland of Arcadia the limestone of Mount Cyllene rises into one of the highest peaks of the Peloponnese, and in a cave on its slope the eldest of the seven sisters kept to herself. She is the quietest figure in a noisy family. Her six sisters bore children to gods and were hunted by Orion across the literature; she stayed in the dark of the hill, away from the company of Olympus, and the stories that gather around her gather because of what came out of that cave, not because of anything she sought. Maia carries two distinct lives under a single name. In the Greek tradition she is the firstborn Pleiad and the mother of Hermes. In Roman cult she is an indigenous goddess of growth, addressed in the rites of early spring, whom Rome in time read as the same person. The two were not one to begin with. A shared name and a shared cast of nurture drew them together, and the join was never quite secure even to the ancients who made it.

The eldest Pleiad

The Greek Maia is the daughter of the Titan Atlas, the strong one of the older race set at the edge of the world to hold up the sky, and of the Oceanid Pleione. The two were of the first generations — a Titan, a child of the elder gods who ruled before the Olympians, and an Oceanid, one of the daughters of the world-encircling river Ocean. From their union came seven daughters, the Pleiades, set at last among the stars as the compact cluster in Taurus that still bears the name. Maia stands first of the seven, the eldest, and in temperament the most withdrawn. Where her sisters move through the genealogies as mothers of founding lines, Maia is given almost no narrative of her own. She is a presence rather than an actor — named, placed, and then largely silent.

Her cave is on Mount Cyllene, in the wild center of Arcadia, the mountainous interior of the Peloponnese that the Greeks treated as the oldest and most rustic of their lands. She avoided the gatherings of the gods, and it was into that solitude that Zeus came. He came at night and in secret, the early tellings are careful to say, while Hera slept and would not learn of it; and Maia, who asked for none of it, bore a son. The child was Hermes.

The newborn in the cave

The fullest account of that birth, and of the single extraordinary day that followed it, is the early Homeric Hymn to Hermes — Hymn 4 of the collection that came down under Homer’s name, though the hymns are the work of various poets across the archaic age. It opens by naming the mother: Maia, daughter of Atlas, the modest nymph of the shadowy cave, who lay with Zeus and shunned the company of the blessed gods. From that opening the hymn turns, with evident relish, to the child, and the rest is his.

Hermes is born at dawn and does not stay an infant for long. By midday he has slipped from his cradle and crossed the threshold of the cave, where he finds a tortoise at the door; he hollows the shell, fixes reeds and stretched hide and strings across it, and so makes the first lyre, drawing music from an animal that a moment before was alive. By evening he has gone north to the meadows where the cattle of Apollo graze, cut fifty head from the herd, and driven them off backward so that the tracks point the wrong way — a newborn’s first act in the world an act of theft, and an ingenious one. When Apollo, following the impossible trail, comes to the cave and accuses him, Hermes lies with a straight face, an infant protesting that he knows nothing of cattle and was only born yesterday. The dispute goes up to Zeus, who laughs; and it is settled not by force but by exchange, when Hermes hands Apollo the lyre and Apollo, disarmed by the sound of it, gives the cattle over and takes the instrument for his own. The god of boundaries, traffic, theft, eloquence, and the crossing between worlds is fully formed before his first day is out. Maia is the still point at the start of it: the cave is hers, the secrecy was hers, and the son who turns the world inside out within hours of his birth is the one thing the quiet nymph is remembered for.

It bears keeping straight that this Hermes is the Olympian — herald of the gods, guide of the dead, the swift god of the kerykeion — and not the much later Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great sage of the Egyptian-Greek wisdom literature whom a separate tradition built by fusing the Greek god with Egyptian Thoth. Maia is mother to the first. The later teacher carries the name forward into another world entirely, and no mythographer makes her his parent.

The bear’s son in her care

One further thread ties Maia to the country around her hill. In the older Arcadian cycle, the nymph Callisto, a companion of Artemis, bore a son to Zeus and was turned into a bear for it — to be set, in the end, among the stars as the Great Bear. The child, Arcas, is left motherless, and in the version preserved in the handbook that goes under the name of Apollodorus he is given to Maia to rear in her cave on Cyllene. The detail is small but it places her precisely: the reclusive Pleiad becomes the foster-mother of the boy from whom Arcadia itself was said to take its name, and her solitude on the mountain is folded into the foundation-lore of the whole region. She raises the son of one transformed nymph having borne the son of the same god in the same secrecy; the parallel is the kind of thing the Arcadian genealogies liked to draw, and it deepens her single, consistent role across the myths — the woman in the cave to whom remarkable children are entrusted, or born.

The Italic goddess Rome called by the name

The Roman Maia is a separate inheritance, and she stands apart most clearly before the join to the Greek is drawn. She was an old Italian deity, native to the religion of Latium and not imported from Greece — a goddess of the earth’s increase and the warming of spring, of the swelling of seed and the fertility of the growing season. Her cult belonged to the calendar more than to story. She had no tale of birth or theft or transformation; she was addressed in rite, on a fixed day, for what she made grow.

That day was the first of May. Her closest cultic partner was Vulcan, the old Italian god of fire and the forge, and the link between an earth-goddess and a fire-god is itself archaic and a little opaque — the antiquarian Macrobius, gathering the learning of the late empire, reports the priest of Vulcan, the flamen Volcanalis, offering sacrifice to Maia on the Kalends of May. The month itself, Maius, the Romans connected to her, and the connection gave her name a long second life in the calendars of Europe; but that the month was hers was never agreed even in Rome. The same chapter of Macrobius preserves a clutch of rival claims — that the wife of Vulcan was not Maia at all but Maiesta, a separate figure; that the month took its name not from any goddess but from the maiores, the elders or ancestors honored at its start. Ovid, opening the fifth book of his Fasti on the rites of May, stages exactly this uncertainty as a quarrel among the Muses, who offer the month to Majesty, to the elders, and to Maia the Pleiad in turn, and leaves the poet unwilling to decide between them. The derivation of the name from the goddess was a live guess, not a settled fact, by the time anyone wrote it down.

A shared name, a shared sense of nurture

What made the two Maias easy to fuse was a coincidence of sound that carried a coincidence of meaning. The name lies very close to the ordinary word maia, used in both Greek and Latin as a respectful term for an older woman — a nurse, a midwife, a foster-mother, a “good mother.” It is a word of nurture, and both goddesses sat near it: the Greek Maia who reared Hermes and the bear’s son in her cave, and the Italic Maia who nursed the growing world into spring. That maternal sense ran through both and made the identification feel natural rather than forced.

The hinge of the join, though, was Mercury. When Rome set its own gods beside the Greek and matched them one to one, the native Mercury — god of merchants, of trade and gain and persuasive speech — was identified with the Greek Hermes, and the whole Greek story came across with the equation. Hermes was the son of Maia; so the Roman Mercury, now the same god, drew his Italic near-namesake the goddess Maia toward the role of his mother, and the two Maias were read as one. The pull went through the son. Merchants, Macrobius notes, sacrificed to Maia together with Mercury in his month, the commercial god and the growth-goddess honored side by side because a name and an equation had made them kin.

The ancients themselves were unsure how far to push it. Beyond the question of Vulcan’s wife and the month’s name, the learned tradition entangled the Italic Maia with other shadowy female powers of the old Latin earth — with Bona Dea, the “Good Goddess” whose true name the women of her cult kept secret, and with Fauna, the wild counterpart of Faunus, and at points with Terra, the Earth herself, and with Ops, the power of plenty. Macrobius runs several of these together as faces of one earth-power; others kept them apart. The merger of the two Maias sat inside this larger, looser Roman work of fitting Greek myth onto native cult and reconciling the half-remembered goddesses of Italy’s own past, and the seams show.

A word of caution belongs at the edge of the name. The sound recurs far outside this Greco-Roman pair — in the mother of the Buddha and in the Sanskrit term for the world’s veil of appearance, among others — but those are homophones from unrelated traditions, with no thread of descent or borrowing tying them to the Pleiad or the Italic goddess. The Greek nymph and the Latin growth-goddess are joined by the historical fact of Roman syncretism; the wider echoes of the syllable are not.

The texts and the scholarship

The Greek Maia survives almost entirely as a name in other people’s stories, and the work of reconstructing her is the work of collation. Her parentage and her place among the seven sisters come from the genealogies — Hesiod’s Theogony sets the Pleiades as daughters of Atlas and Pleione — and her single great moment is the opening of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, whose hundreds of lines on her son begin by naming the mother in the cave. The hymn is read in English most familiarly in Hugh Evelyn-White’s 1914 Loeb, freely available at Wikisource. The handbook ascribed to Apollodorus, the Bibliotheca (3.10.2), supplies the compact genealogy of Hermes from Maia, and elsewhere (3.8.2) the detail of her fostering of Arcas; Pausanias, traveling Arcadia in the second century, records the local geography of Cyllene and its Hermes-cult. The standard modern synthesis of all of this is Robin Hard’s The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (2004), the reworking of H. J. Rose’s older handbook, which sorts the scattered notices into a single coherent account. A useful gathering of the ancient passages in translation, source by source, is the entry at Theoi.

The Roman Maia is documented in the antiquarian and calendrical literature rather than in myth. The richest single source is Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.12, the chapter on the months, where the rival claims about May, Vulcan’s wife, the flamen Volcanalis, and the goddess’s identification with Bona Dea, Terra, and the rest are all laid out; the Latin is hosted at LacusCurtius. The poet’s-eye view of the same disputes is Ovid, Fasti V, whose opening debate among the Muses dramatizes the three etymologies of the month; A. S. Kline’s translation is at Poetry in Translation. Earlier antiquarians whom Macrobius cites by name — Cingius on Maia as Vulcan’s consort, Cornelius Piso on the rival Maiesta — survive only through him, which is itself a fair measure of how thin the native record of the goddess had grown by the time anyone tried to write her down.

The figure that emerges from both bodies of evidence is consistent in its asymmetry. The Greek Maia is a mother whose whole importance is borrowed from her son: she is at her most vivid in the first fifteen lines of a hymn that then forgets her for five hundred more, the cave going quiet behind the god as he runs off to remake the world. The Roman Maia is a goddess of the turning year who left no story at all, only a day on the calendar and a tangle of guesses about her name. A single word for “good mother,” and a single equation between a Greek herald and a Roman trader, were enough to make the antiquarians call the two of them one — and enough, too, that neither could ever quite absorb the other. The mother in the Arcadian cave and the power that warmed the Latin fields keep their own shapes inside the shared name, two nurtures that the language, and the gods’ genealogies, decided to address together.

→ Related: Callisto · Dione · Hermes Trismegistus · Hermes · Zeus · Apollo · Atlas · Vulcan · Bona Dea · Pleiades · Mercury