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  Many men wanted to marry Atlanta, but she claimed she would marry the man who could outrun her in a race. Hippomenes begged Aphrodite to help him win Atlanta’s hand in marriage and so the goddess gave him a set of irresistible apples and a plan. During the race, every time Atlanta outran Hippomenes, he threw an apple in front of her. Unable to help herself, she would stop to pick up the apple and Hippomenes would run ahead, gaining lost ground. Thus Hippomenes won the race and Atlanta’s hand in marriage.

  But then the couple made the mistake of making love in a temple of Zeus, a crime for which they were turned into lions, which—according to folklore—cannot mate with each other. Thus they roamed the world together, but were never united in love.

  In the Mahabharata, Shikhandi is a woman who is trained to be a warrior. But unlike Atlanta, whose femininity and sexuality are acknowledged in the Greek myths, Shikhandi is raised as a man, allowed to enter the battlefield after she acquires male genitals from a yaksha.

  Powerful female characters in Greek mythology eschew sexual relationships with men, as if contact with men will drain them of their powers. Thus Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, are virgins. Atlanta takes the oath of virginity and dedicates herself to Artemis, yet she falls in love with Meleager and Hippomenes. In both instances, the relationship remains unfulfilled.

  In many versions, Atlanta does join the Argonaut expedition to be with Meleager who proved his love by abandoning his wife. She chases him by running on the sea. But they were forbidden to mate for the loss of her virginity would affect the voyage. Eventually she gives up and lets him go onward while she returns to land.

  A recurring theme in Greek mythology is the punishment Olympians mete out to those who desecrate temples by having sex in them. Though the Greek gods have intense sex lives, celibacy is valued. This idea had a huge impact on Christianity as well.

  Lemnos

  After the Argonauts set sail, the first island they came upon was Lemnos, where there were no men. The women were so happy to see the Argonauts that they took care of all their needs. So wonderful was the hospitality that the men forgot all about their mission. Jason married the leader of the women, and encouraged his fellow sailors to marry the other women. The women bore children and a new race known as the Minyans came into being.

  But Heracles was not so easily fooled. He investigated and found out that the women had murdered their husbands.

  These women had once angered Aphrodite who had then caused their bodies to emit a foul odour. Repulsed by them, their husbands sought the company of other women, who eventually became their secret wives. When the women discovered this, they murdered their husbands.

  Heracles pressured Jason and the Argonauts to leave the island, reminding them of the mission, which they did, albeit grudgingly.

  The fear of women’s sexuality and their trapping the hero is a consistent theme in Greek as well as Hindu mythology. In the Nath-yogi tradition, celibate yogis are constantly fighting the pull of the sensual yoginis.

  The phrase ‘Lemnian deeds’ refers to the vengeful slaughter of a group of people, often of the same gender. In the story of the Argonauts, women slaughter their unfaithful husbands. Herodotus tells the story of Pelasgian men who kidnapped Athenian women and took them to the island of Lemnos, determined to make them their wives. However, the women refused to submit and insisted on teaching their children Athenian, not Pelasgian, ways, angering their husbands, who killed the children first and then the defiant mothers. The Danaids were sisters who killed their husbands on their wedding night and so were cast into Tartarus, trying forever to fill a bucket of water using broken pots.

  Lemnos is also the island where Philoctetes is abandoned at the start of the Trojan War after he is bitten by a serpent that causes his foot to rot and smell foul. After ten years, the Greeks come to fetch him as it is foretold that Troy will not fall without Heracles’ bow, which is in Philoctetes’ possession.

  Doliones

  After it passed Hellespont, the Argo reached a peninsula which was home to a civilized and friendly race called the Doliones and the barbaric and hostile race of the six-armed Gegeines. The Doliones welcomed the Argonauts and told them where they could find food and how they should avoid the wild Gegeines.

  While the other Argonauts went off in search of food, Heracles decided to stay back and guard the ship; a good decision, as it turned out, for the Gegeines did attack the ship, but Heracles was able to fend them off.

  When it was time to leave, the Doliones bade the Argonauts farewell. The Argo set sail, but at night, a storm pushed the ship back towards the peninsula.

  In the darkness, the Doliones mistook the Argonauts for raiders. The Argonauts too did not realize they had returned to the same shore whence a few hours earlier they had set sail. In the skirmish that followed, many were slain, including Cyzicus, the young king of the Doliones.

  In the morning light, when the truth was discovered, there was great sorrow. The queen of the Doliones was so upset that she killed herself. A great funeral was organized in honour of the dead on both sides, but it did not assuage their grief.

  The queen of the Doliones kills herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Greek mythology occasionally refers to women killing themselves to share the death of their husbands. Was this practice—what is known as sati in Hinduism—a custom of the Indo-European or Aryan race that spread both to Greece and India?

  Cyzicus had killed one of the lions of Cybele and the goddess arranged for the ‘accidental’ slaughter of his people by the Argonauts.

  Hylas

  When the Argo was ready to set sail again, Heracles did not join the ship. His manservant and arms-bearer, Hylas, who had gone inland foraging for food, had not returned, and Heracles refused to leave without him. Although Jason insisted that the quest could not wait for just one man, Heracles was resolute. Telamon and Peleus, sons of Aeacus, also joined him, abandoning the Argonaut mission.

  Hylas was the son of Theiodamas, whose wife had had an affair with Heracles. When the relationship was discovered it led to a duel in which Theiodamas was killed. Perhaps out of guilt, or genuine affection for the beautiful boy, Heracles took Theiodamas’s son under his wing as his arms-bearer.

  Hylas was never found. While fetching water from a stream for his master, he had caught the eye of a group of water nymphs who were so enamoured by his beauty that they abducted him.

  Heracles, after a long but fruitless search, decided to return home to Greece, via the famed city of Troy.

  The idea of man–boy love is conspicuous by its absence in Hindu mythology. This form of homoerotic expression was common in Greek mythology. In Hindu mythology, homoerotic expression takes the form of gender transformation: a man becomes a woman as in the case of Ila and Narada, or a woman becomes a man as in the folklore of Bahucharji mata in Gujarat, each time after they fall into a waterbody or enter an enchanted forest.

  The love Heracles bore for Hylas is parental according to the Greek poet Theocritus who wrote 2300 years ago, though Christopher Marlowe refers to it as homoerotic in his play Edward II (1593), similar to the relationship between Zeus and Ganymede.

  Heracles chooses Hylas over the Argonaut expedition. Some scholars claim that he does this in a spirit of generosity, to avoid overshadowing Jason’s leadership.

  The similarity of the Greek word melon for both apple and sheep has led people to see parallels between Heracles’ quest for the golden apples at Hesperides in the north and Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece at Colchis in the east.

  Castor and Pollux

  The next stop on the Argo’s voyage was the land of the Bebryces, whose ruler, Amycus, welcomed the Argonauts and after offering them refreshments, invited them to a game of boxing. Only, this was no game, as the Argonauts soon discovered; Amycus fought to kill. And no one was allowed to leave his kingdom until they played the game.

  The first of the Argonauts to rise to Amycus’s challenge was Castor. He a