From what I have read, after adding the relevant maven repositories, maven should automatically download the necessary jars to satisfy dependencies in the pom.xml file.
However, no jars ever get downloaded for me after I add dependencies in eclipse. Am I missing some glaringly obvious step?
Dependencies jars aren't in your project but in your local maven repository.
These jars will be automatically used when you compile you project with maven (or m2eclipse).
If you don't have the needed jar yet, maven will download it for you.