[6] According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Zeus, in the dead of night, secretly made love to Maia,[8] who avoided the company of the gods, in a cave of Cyllene.

The rapidly maturing infant Hermes crawled away to Thessaly, where, by nightfall of his first day, he stole some of his half-brother Apollo's cattle and invented the lyre from a tortoise shell.

[12] In ancient Roman religion and myth, Maia embodied the concept of growth,[13] as her name was thought to be related to the comparative adjective maius, maior "larger, greater".

[14] In an archaic Roman prayer,[15] Maia appears as an attribute of Vulcan, in an invocational list of male deities paired with female abstractions representing some aspect of their functionality.

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 Kalends of May.