Maia

Traditionally Maia is named as a daughter of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione and the eldest of the seven Pleiades. Classical summaries place her birth on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes and other classical accounts Zeus secretly lay with Maia in a cave of Cyllene, and she became the mother of Hermes. Maia also appears in accounts as the foster-mother of Arcas, the son of Callisto and Zeus.

Sources characterize Maia primarily as a mountain nymph (oread) and as one of the Pleiades; detailed physical descriptions are not provided in the supplied materials. A surviving epithet attributed to Simonides describes her as 'mountain Maia' (Maiados oureias) and refers to her as 'of the lovely black eyes.' No standardized iconography or further corporeal traits are supplied in the cited summaries.

Maia's portrayed functions in the sources are maternal and nurturing: she gives birth to and nurses Hermes (Homeric Hymn to Hermes) and serves as a foster-mother to Arcas after Callisto's transformation. She is described as reclusive — 'avoiding the company of the gods' — and is associated with particular landscapes (Mount Cyllene) and with the Pleiades star-cluster, forming part of mythic etiologies that connect human/divine events to constellations. The supplied sources do not ascribe magical powers, cultic offices, or hostile capabilities beyond these narrative and symbolic roles.