Maia (mythology)

MaiaThe alternate spelling Maja represents the intervocalic i as j, pronounced similarly to an initial y in English; hence Latin maior, "greater," in English became "major." (pronounced:/ˈmeɪ.ə/ or /ˈmaɪ.ə/; Ancient Greek: Μαῖα; Latin: Maia), in ancient Greek religion, is one of the Pleiades and the mother of Hermes.
Maia is the daughter of AtlasHesiod, Theogony 938. and Pleione the Oceanid,Pseudo-Apollodorus, Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke 3.10.1. and is the oldest of the seven Pleiades.Bibliotheke 3.10.2; Aratus, Phainomena 255–263. Maia is the only one of the Pleiades named by these two sources to appear also in the rather idiosyncratic list given by the Scholiast to Theocritus (13.25), who says they were the daughters of the Amazons; see the note of J.G. Frazer in his 1921 Loeb Classical Library edition and translation of what was then assumed to be the work of Apollodorus of Athens, the Bibliotheca, vol. 2, p. 2. They were born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia,Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke 3.10.1. and are sometimes called mountain nymphs, oreads; Simonides of Ceos sang of "mountain Maia" (Maiados oureias) "of the lovely black eyes."Simonides, Fragment 555. Because they were daughters of Atlas, they were also called the Atlantides.Diodorus Siculus 3.60.4.
==Mother of Hermes==
According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Zeus in the dead of night secretly begot Hermes upon Maia, who avoided the company of the gods, in a cave of Cyllene. After giving birth to the baby, Maia wrapped him in blankets and went to sleep. The rapidly maturing infant Hermes crawled away to Thessaly, where by night-fall of his first day he stole some of his half-brother Apollo's cattle and invented the lyre from a tortoise shell. Maia refused to believe Apollo when he claimed Hermes was the thief and Zeus then sided with Apollo. Finally, Apollo exchanged the cattle for the lyre, which became one of his identifying attributes.
==As nurturer==
Maia also raised the infant Arcas, the child of Callisto with Zeus. Wronged by the love affair, Zeus' wife Hera in a jealous rage had transformed Callisto into a bear. Arcas is the eponym of Arcadia], where Maia was born.Bibliotheke 3.101. The story of Callisto and Arcas, like that of the Pleiades, is an aition for a stellar formation, the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great and Little Bear.
Her name is related to μαῖα (maia), an honorific term for older women related to μήτηρ (mētēr) 'mother'. Maia also means "midwife" in Greek.Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine (Routledge, 2004), p. 101.
==Roman Maia==
In ancient Roman religion and myth, Maia embodied the concept of growth,Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome: Religion in Everyday Life from Archaic to Imperial Times (Routledge, 2001), p. 70. as her name was thought to be related to the comparative adjective maius, maior, "larger, greater." Originally, she may have been a homonym independent of the Greek Maia, whose myths she absorbed through the Hellenization of Latin literature and culture.Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Blackwell, 1996, originally published in French 1951), p. 270.
In an archaic Roman prayer,Preserved by Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 13.10.2. Maia appears as an attribute of Vulcan, in an invocational list of male deities paired with female abstractions representing some aspect of their functionality. She was explicitly identified with Earth (Terra, the Roman counterpart of Gaia) and the Good Goddess (Bona Dea) in at least one tradition.By Cornelius Labeo, as recorded by Macrobius, 1.12.20; H.H.J. Brouwer, Bona Dea: The Sources and a Description of the Cult (Brill, 1989), pp. 232, 354. Her identity became theologically intertwined also with the goddesses Fauna, Magna Mater ("Great Goddess", referring to the Roman form of Cybele but also a cult title for Maia), Ops, Juno, and Carna, as discussed at some length by the late antiquarian writer Macrobius.Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.12.16–33. This treatment was probably influenced by the 1st-century BCE scholar Varro, who tended to resolve a great number of goddesses into one original "Terra."Brouwer, Bona Dea, p. 354. The association with Juno, whose Etruscan counterpart was Uni, is suggested again by the inscription Uni Mae on the Piacenza Liver.In Mario Torelli's diagram of this haruspicial object, the names Uni and Mae appear together in a cell on the edge of the liver; see Nancy Thompson de Grummond, Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, 2006), p. 44 online.
The month of May (Latin Maius) was supposedly named for Maia, though ancient etymologists also connected it to the maiores, "ancestors," again from the adjective maius, maior, meaning those who are "greater" in terms of generational precedence. On the first day of May, the Lares Praestites were honored as protectors of the city,Ovid, Fasti v.73; Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome, p. 70. and the flamen of Vulcan sacrificed a pregnant sow to Maia, a customary offering to an earth goddessMacrobius, Saturnalia 1.12.20; Juvenal, Satires ii.86; Festus 68. that reiterates the link between Vulcan and Maia in the archaic prayer formula. In Roman myth, Mercury (Hermes), the son of Maia, was the father of the twin Lares, a genealogy that sheds light on the collocation of ceremonies on the May Kalends.T.P. Wiseman, Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 71. On May 15, the Ides, Mercury was honored as a patron of merchants and increaser of profit (through an etymological connection with merx, merces, "goods, merchandise"), another possible connection with Maia his mother as a goddess who promoted growth.Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome, pp. 70–71.
==See also==
* Bona Dea
==References==
==Bibliography==
* Grimal, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, ISBN 978-0-631-20102-1. "Maia" p. 270
*Harry Thurston Peck, Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, 1898
* Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Maia" 
*Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911.
==External links==
*Theoi Project – Nymphe Maia
Category:Roman mythology
Category:Nature goddesses
Category:Greek Mythology