Maia

Eldest of the seven Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione. She lived a solitary life in a deep, well-shaded cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia; the *Homeric Hymn to Hermes* opens by making her shyness from the company of the gods the reason Zeus chose to come to her there in secret. The child she bore Zeus was Hermes — born at dawn, walking by midday, by evening already a thief and the inventor of the lyre. After her son's elevation Maia is silent in the tradition and remains attached to the cave; the catasterism makes her one of the seven stars on the Bull's shoulder (the cluster M45 in Taurus), the heliacal rising of which in May was the canonical cue to begin the harvest year, and whose Hyginus-version myth has Orion pursuing the seven sisters until Zeus turned them into stars.

Associated Places