Of all the fourteen women whose shades Odysseus named, Maira’s story is the most obscure. But her kin were exceedingly famous in ancient Greek mythology.
Like Oidipous’ (Oedipus’) two sons Eteokles and Polyneikes at Thebes, Abas’ sons Akrisios and Proitos were royal brothers who contended against each other at Argos. Indeed, their enmity was from the beginning so fierce that they even fought with each other in the womb before they were born. Akrisios went on to have a daughter Danaë, who, though he persecuted her horribly, had a story with a happy ending. Danaë conceived and bore a son by Zeus, the happiest of all Greek heroes, Perseus, who ultimately redeemed his mother and himself succeeded to kingship in Argos.
Proitos also had a daughter, the Maira whose soul Odysseus encountered in the First Nekyia. She too conceived and bore a son by Zeus, a fellow named Lokrós. When that happened Maira was however a sworn companion of Artemis, and celibacy was of course a strict condition of that status. So Artemis killed Maira for violation of the bar to her devotees’ concourse with any male, and although Lokrós went on to become a co-founder of Thebes (with Amphion and Zetos), there was nothing he could do for his tragic mother when he reached manhood, she being long since dead.
So goes the story as told by some ancient commentators on the Odyssey. However, about the famous mural by Polygnotos that Pausanias saw at Delphoi in the second century a.D. and which he described in his Hellados Periegesis (X xxx 5), we read:
Beyond them [Phokos and Iaseus] is Maira sitting on a rock. About her the poem Returns [one of the Epic Cycle] says that she was still a maid when she departed this life, being the daughter of Proitos, son of Thersandros, who was a son of Sisyphos. Next to Maira is Aktaion, son of Aristaios, together with the mother of Aktaion; they hold in their hands a young deer, and are sitting on a deerskin. A hunting dog lies stretched out beside them...
In Pausanias’ version of the myth of Maira there is obviously much difference from the story generally told by the later sources as given above. That Maira was, like Aktaion, a famous victim of Artemis, is however implicit in Polygnotos’ depiction of her. Whether the line in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VII 362) pertains to the Maira of the Odyssey is unknowable,
et quos Maera novo latratu terruit agros
and where Maira spread terror over the fields by her strange barking.
But having turned the male hunter Aktaion into a game animal in order to kill him for an infraction of the goddess’s anti-sexual ordinances, it would be quite in character for Artemis to have turned the female Maira into a hound in order to cause her death for a similar fault.