Maia was born to Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the heavens for eternity, and the Oceanid Pleione, one of the three thousand daughters of Oceanus, the vast encircling ocean and eldest of the primordial deities. She had six sisters: Alcyone, Electra, Taygete, Celaeno, Sterope, and Merope, and together they were known as the Pleiades, the seven sisters who were later placed among the stars as a constellation. Their father stood at the western edge of the world, his shoulders bearing the weight of the sky, and their mother was a sea nymph of surpassing beauty. Maia was the eldest, the most beautiful, and the most withdrawn. While her sisters mingled with gods and mortals, she preferred the solitude of the mountains, and she made her home in a deep cave on the slopes of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, the rugged highland region of the Peloponnese, the peninsula of southern Greece.

The cave was her sanctuary, a place of darkness and coolness where the mountain winds did not reach. She lived alone, tending to the wild things of the mountain and avoiding the quarrels of Olympus. But Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled with his thunderbolt, had noticed her. He saw her beauty and her solitude, and he desired her. He came to her cave in secret, while Hera, the queen of Olympus and goddess of marriage, slept in her golden chamber on the mountain of the gods. The visits were brief and hidden, and Maia asked for nothing. She was not a goddess of power or ambition; she was a nymph who loved the quiet of the mountain. But the union of Zeus and a nymph always produced something extraordinary, and Maia was no exception.

She conceived a child, and when the time came she gave birth alone in her cave on Mount Cyllene. The labour was swift, and the infant that emerged was unlike any other. He was beautiful, with dark eyes that seemed to see everything, and he grew with supernatural speed. On the very day of his birth, while Maia slept exhausted from the delivery, the baby crawled from his swaddling clothes and wandered out of the cave. He found a tortoise in the mountain grass, killed it, and hollowed out its shell. He stretched seven strings of sheep gut across the shell and invented the lyre, the first musical instrument. Then, driven by an insatiable curiosity, he walked to the pastures of Pieria in Thessaly, the region of northern Greece, where Apollo, the god of music and light, kept his sacred cattle. Hermes, for that was the child's name, stole fifty of the finest cows and drove them backward so that their tracks would seem to lead away from his cave rather than toward it. He killed two of the cattle and offered them as a sacrifice to the twelve Olympians, and he hid the rest in a cave near Mount Cyllene.

Maia woke to find her son gone and the cave filled with the smell of roasted meat. When Apollo, enraged by the theft of his cattle, came to the cave with his bow drawn, Maia stood before him and denied everything. She pointed to the infant in his cradle, swaddled and seemingly innocent, and declared that a newborn could not have stolen cattle. But Apollo was not deceived. He had found the tracks of the stolen herd, and they led to the cave. He accused Hermes, and the infant, with a smile that was already sly, confessed. He offered Apollo the lyre he had made as compensation, and Apollo, charmed by the music, accepted. The two gods became friends, and Hermes was admitted to Olympus as the messenger of the gods, the patron of thieves, merchants, and travellers. Maia watched her son ascend to divinity, and she remained in her cave, the mother of a god who had outgrown her in a single day.

In time, Maia and her sisters were placed among the stars. Some said it was to escape the pursuit of Orion, the giant hunter who lusted after them; others said it was a gift from Zeus to honour their father Atlas. Maia became the brightest star of the Pleiades, visible in the constellation Taurus, and her name was given to the month of May by the Romans, who identified her with their goddess of growth and fertility. She remained a figure of quiet power, the nymph who had raised a god in a cave and then let him go. Her story was told in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, one of the oldest and most charming poems of the Greek tradition, and her cave on Mount Cyllene was shown to travellers for centuries as the birthplace of the messenger god.