i saw "Who Mourns for Adonais?" yesterday, 09-22-2022.
In "Where No Man Has Gone Before":
And of course what Kirk really meant was:
"Above all else, mortals need a god with compassion!"
And in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" They met Apollo, who claimed to have been one of the aliens who inspired the Gods of Greek mythology.
And Apollo claimed to want to care for and protect lowly mortals - when not threatening to zap them with lightening bolts for disobeying him.
And later kirk says:
And certainly there was great failure of communications in this episode. The population of Earth humans was probably several billions in the ea of TOS. And so there would have been a number of minority groups who longed for different lives than were available in the Federation, since there always have been. And I note that many people have very odd ideas about what a good life would be like.
And I think that living the lifestyle of Apollo worshippers would not be nearly as silly a lifestyle as some human groups have sought to live, so no doubt many thousands of humans would be willing to travel to Pollux IV to become Apollo worshippers. And I think that, if interstelalr travel was easy enough in TOS, a much larger proportion of the population would be wiling to go to Pollux IV and worship Apollo for a short time during their vacations. I don't think that Pollux IV could ever be one of he most popular vacation planets, but there should have been a lot of potential vacationers willing to visit there.
So I don't know why Kirk couldn't think of making Apollo a counter offer. Apollo lets the Enterprise go, leaving some people to get to know Apollo. Enterprise sends message to Earth describing Pollux IV and Apollo's desire for worshippers Enterprise returns when agreed to pick up the people left there, and leaves a few more as replacements for them if Apollo has not zapped anybody with lightenng bolts. And if reports continue to say that Apollo is non threatening, eventually ships full of colonists will come to Pollux IV. Even though most of the billions of people on Earth won't want to come to Pollux IV and worshp Apollo, many will.
But were Apollo and the other Polluixians/Greek gods really reponsible for Greek Civilization? Remember that Greek Culture and Greek Civilization are two different things. Ancient Greek culture consisted of speaking ancient Greek, worshipping the Greek gods, and many other cultural traits. Civilization consists of being civilizized. It means having animal husbandry, agriculture, metals, writing, ciities, etc.
So there wasn't really a Greek Civilization, there was an ancient Greek Culture which existed in Greece and on other shores of the Mediterranean and Black seas and which was part of the Ancient MIddle Eastern civilization spreading westward to the Mediterannean shores of Africa and Europe.
The ancient Greeks had a separate culture which was part of the Middle Eastern Civilization, just as today France and Japan and Bolivia have their own separate cultures which are part of the world wide civilization.
When did the Greek Gods settle on Earth?
So Kirk imagined the Greek gods settled around the Mediterranean about 5,000 years ago, and McCoy specifially thought that they settled in Greece.
And about 5,000 years ago there were civilizatinos in Mesopotamia and Egypt and proto civilizations in a nmber of places. .And how quickly did those super advanced aliens teach their worshippers to be civilized?
Apparently Greece didn't becoeme civilized until roughly about t600 BC, the Mycenaean Culture, a full 1,400 years or so after KIrk though that the Greek gods came ot Earth. And it is quite possible that all of the motivation to become more civilized came from knowledge of, and imitation of, more civilized cultures to the east, and that the Greek gods made no effort to encourage the Greeks to become more civilized.
Why did the Greek gods leave Earth and return to Pollux IV?
I note that Apollo said he was half human and born on Earth.
So that indicates that Apollow could have been born on Earth 5,000 years earlier.
I suppose that the Greek gods were worshipped in Greece and eastern Turkey by hundreds of thousands or a few milliion people about 1000 BC about 6,000 years ago. Then the Greeks began establish Greek city states on the shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and the numbers of their worshippers increased a bit.
Alexader the Great Conquered the mighty Persian Empire about 333 to 323 BC, and in the following Helenistic Age there were Greek cities scattered over the Middle East to the borders of central Asia and India. The numbers of worshippers might have increased.
Then the Romans coquered the Meditertanean and the Roman upper class adopted a lot of Greek Culture, becoming bilingual. Latin culture was spread over the western part of the Roman Empire, and that included a bit of Roman Culture. The Roman gods were worshppped officially all over the Empire and were identified with the Greek gods, inclreasing their worshippers.
But in the Classical Age of Greek more and philiosophers doubted the existance of the Greek gods. During the Roman Empire fewer and fewer of the Greek believed in their Greek religion, so it became easy for Christianity to replace it in the eastern section of the Roman Empire between about AD 300 and 500 or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)#:~:text=According to the Greek historian,the Greek island of Paxi.
By about 600 barbarian Avars and Slavs were raiding into the Bulkan, and after 602 Slavs invaded and took over most of the Balkans including most of Greece. And of course they worshppped slavic gods instead of Christ or pagan gods. And beginning in the 630s Muslims from Arabia conquered provence after provence of the eastern Roman Empire. The Muslims tolerated their Christian and Jewish subjects, but would have slaughtered any pagan worshippers they caught.
The Roman Empire retained most of Asia Minor and about AD 800 reconquered most of Greece. But by then most of the pagsn left in Greece would have been worshippers of the Slavic gods, not the Greek ones.
So assuming that the Greek gods decided that their human worshippers were abandoning their worship somewhere between about AD 1 and 800, they would have left Earth and Returned to Pollux IV about 1,567 to 2,367 years before the offical date of "Who Mourns for Adonais?" in AD 2267.
But when Apollo first communicates with the Enterprise,he says:
This implies that Apollo hasn't see a human for 5,000 years.
So 5,000 years after about AD 1 to 800 would be about AD 5001 to AD 5800 for the date of "Who Mourns for Adonais?".
Or 5,000 years before the official date for "Who Mourns for Adonais?" in AD 2367 gives a date of about 2633 BC for when the Greek gods left Earth.
Naturally one would assume that if the Greek gods lived on Earth they would have done so during the period of about 500 BC to AD 500 when they had many worshippers, or that at the earliest they wouldn't have left Earth until the heroic age of Greek myths was over about 1000 BC..Apollo does mention characters from the heroic age.
Possibly there is some confusion about whether the span of 5,000 years is the time since the Greek gods left earth, or the time since Apollo was born, or the time since the older Greek gods came to Earth. Or possibly it is a correct round figure for all three events, and maybe only a few centuries seperated the first coming of th the Greek gods to Earth and their leaving Earth.
If all three events happened within a few centuries of about 2633 BC, a possible outline of the history would be that the Greek gods came ot Earth, settled in Greece, and were worshipped by Greeks for centuries. Then the Greeks stopped worshipping them, and the Greek gods left. But a tiny remnant of the worshippers of the Greek gods preserved their religion, and eventually reconverted the Greeks to worshipping the Greek gods, unknown to the Greek gods who had left Earth too soon to see and enoy the vicotory of their followers.
The point of this is that there is no proof that the Greek gods had anything to do with bringing civilization to the Greeks or with the achievements of Greek culture, despite being worshpped as gods and thus having a lot of ability to influence their worshppers.
So what is Apollo's idea of paradise?
He apparently wants the humans to be hunters or herdsmen at the best. He mentions nothing about agriculture.
I note that the life of a shepherd or other herder is not necessarily all fun and games. When I was a chlld I once saw a sheep which was being used to eat grass and keep a lawn cropped short escape. The owner of the property grabbed the sheep's chain and started draggng the sheep back to the stake the chain had been attached to. And I was surprised by what a struggle it was and how strong the sheep was. I guess that sheep wrangling can be an exhausting job.
And a lot of livestock is larger and more dangerous than sheep. Many people are killed by farm animals like cows, bulls, pigs, horses, camels, etc
And herdsmen have to be on guard to protect their animals from predatory animals, which in some cases have decided to prey on the herdsmen themselves.
It is a common myth that a simple life is a happy life, and that a simple and happy life requires a simple society with simple technology..
But actually a complex society with with complex technology is necessary to have a life style which is either simple or happy. I, personally, have a relatively simple and happy lifestyle because I live in a complex society.
Many people from advanced societies take vacations in tropical lands, and enjoy relaxing in places they call "tropical paradises". But those vacation spots seem like paradises to those who relax there because of the work of the resort employees who may love or hate or have mixed feelinng about their jobs.
In a sufficiently advanced society everyone could be on vacation all the time, supported, not by slaves or serfs or servants or employees, but by computers and robots.
And everyone reading this should know people who are alive today only because of scientific and medicial advances produced by thousands and millions of persons working in specialized fields, supported by the wealth of an advanced technological society.
For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. And it is said that the lives of hunter-gatherers were very pleasant and they only had to work a few hours a day and could goof of and have fun the rest of the time. An easy lifestyle for those who don't mind killing animals and cutting them apart and getitng blood all over themselves, and roasting them on open fires.
But what was the price of such an easy lifestyle? Early death. An adult hunter-gatherer could probably expect to live to be about fifty years old, though of course some died much younger and some died much older. And people in modern advanced societies live on the average a few decades longer than than the average for hunter-gatheerers, though some die much younger and some die much older than the modern average.
And after a few centuries more of advancing civilization, people will no longer need to work any more hours than hunter-gatherers did, but they will live at least as long as contemporary humans, and perhaps their average lifespan will equal or exceed the 137 years of Doctor McCoy. And every second spent being alive is infinitely happier than a second being dead.
But you may note that I said that an adult hunter-gatherer could expect to live to be about fifty.years old. A newborn hunter-gatherer could expect to live only a few months or years and die in childhood. Hunter-gatherer parents were helpless to keep their children alive very well, no matter how much they wanted to.
And for thousands of years parents in civilized cultures which weren't advanced enough were almost equally helpless to keep their children alive, no matter how much they wanted to. Only on the last two centuries, and especially in the last century, has it been possible to keep most of the children who are born alive into adulthood.
For example, one of my great great great grandparents had 20 children born about 200 years ago, and as I remember at least six of them died as children. One of my great grandparents had eight children born a little over a century ago; four of them lived to be over eighty, and four of them died under ten.
So it seems to me that the sooner the Greek gods went to work encouraging the Greeks to become civilized and to keep on advancing, the sooner the majority of humans would stop dying in childhood.
But the episode gives no clear evidence that the Greek gods ever made any effort to promote civilization on Earth.
What is worse, it is believed that prehistoric hunter-gatherers killed a significant percent of their newborn children. Perhaps the territories of their groups could only support a limited number of people, so they killed some of their newborn children to keep the population low enough to avoid starvation. In that case the children were killed due to the parents being helpless to provide for all their children using a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Thus when agricultural developed to produce more and more food, it became possible for farmers to kill fewer or even none of their children but keep all of them alive as long as they could - though they could do little or nohting to stop diseases from killing many of their children.
But members of civilized societies continued to kill many of their children for thousands of years. It was not until the last two millennia that more and more societies abandoned infanticide. Ancient Greek and Roman writers considered it was very strange that the Egyptians raised all of their children.
So the Greek gods apparently did nothing to forbid infanticide, the second most common cause of human deaths after disease, in ancient Greece.
So I don't think that Apollo and the Geek gods showed a lot of compassion toward their human worshppers. They had the advantage of advanced technology giveing them great powers and lifespans of thousands of years, and yet they might never have done anything to share the benefits of their technology with their subjects and improve their lifestyles and lifespans..
One theory to make the Greek gods seem less indifferent to suffering and death could be tha tthey were not a few members of a society which slowly advanced over many millennia on Pollux IV, until they achieved god like powers and vast lifespans. Such beings would likely have records of what more primitive life was like and how their society advanced.
Instead an advanced society could have visited Pollux IV and found a small band of hunter-gatherers on the edge of extincion, the last survviors of their species, and uplifted them, giving them vast powers and great longevity and.set them loose to observe what they would do with their powers. The Greek gods might not have understood their technology and they might have considered their longevitiy a gift from beings who the Greek gods considered to be gods - gods to the gods, so to speak. And the Greek gods might have thought that if their "gods" didn't give such longevity to Earth humans it wasn't the place of the Greek gods to go against that "devine" decision.
In "Where No Man Has Gone Before":
And of course what Kirk really meant was:
"Above all else, mortals need a god with compassion!"
And in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" They met Apollo, who claimed to have been one of the aliens who inspired the Gods of Greek mythology.
And Apollo claimed to want to care for and protect lowly mortals - when not threatening to zap them with lightening bolts for disobeying him.
And later kirk says:
And certainly there was great failure of communications in this episode. The population of Earth humans was probably several billions in the ea of TOS. And so there would have been a number of minority groups who longed for different lives than were available in the Federation, since there always have been. And I note that many people have very odd ideas about what a good life would be like.
And I think that living the lifestyle of Apollo worshippers would not be nearly as silly a lifestyle as some human groups have sought to live, so no doubt many thousands of humans would be willing to travel to Pollux IV to become Apollo worshippers. And I think that, if interstelalr travel was easy enough in TOS, a much larger proportion of the population would be wiling to go to Pollux IV and worship Apollo for a short time during their vacations. I don't think that Pollux IV could ever be one of he most popular vacation planets, but there should have been a lot of potential vacationers willing to visit there.
So I don't know why Kirk couldn't think of making Apollo a counter offer. Apollo lets the Enterprise go, leaving some people to get to know Apollo. Enterprise sends message to Earth describing Pollux IV and Apollo's desire for worshippers Enterprise returns when agreed to pick up the people left there, and leaves a few more as replacements for them if Apollo has not zapped anybody with lightenng bolts. And if reports continue to say that Apollo is non threatening, eventually ships full of colonists will come to Pollux IV. Even though most of the billions of people on Earth won't want to come to Pollux IV and worshp Apollo, many will.
But were Apollo and the other Polluixians/Greek gods really reponsible for Greek Civilization? Remember that Greek Culture and Greek Civilization are two different things. Ancient Greek culture consisted of speaking ancient Greek, worshipping the Greek gods, and many other cultural traits. Civilization consists of being civilizized. It means having animal husbandry, agriculture, metals, writing, ciities, etc.
So there wasn't really a Greek Civilization, there was an ancient Greek Culture which existed in Greece and on other shores of the Mediterranean and Black seas and which was part of the Ancient MIddle Eastern civilization spreading westward to the Mediterannean shores of Africa and Europe.
The ancient Greeks had a separate culture which was part of the Middle Eastern Civilization, just as today France and Japan and Bolivia have their own separate cultures which are part of the world wide civilization.
When did the Greek Gods settle on Earth?
So Kirk imagined the Greek gods settled around the Mediterranean about 5,000 years ago, and McCoy specifially thought that they settled in Greece.
And about 5,000 years ago there were civilizatinos in Mesopotamia and Egypt and proto civilizations in a nmber of places. .And how quickly did those super advanced aliens teach their worshippers to be civilized?
Apparently Greece didn't becoeme civilized until roughly about t600 BC, the Mycenaean Culture, a full 1,400 years or so after KIrk though that the Greek gods came ot Earth. And it is quite possible that all of the motivation to become more civilized came from knowledge of, and imitation of, more civilized cultures to the east, and that the Greek gods made no effort to encourage the Greeks to become more civilized.
Why did the Greek gods leave Earth and return to Pollux IV?
I note that Apollo said he was half human and born on Earth.
So that indicates that Apollow could have been born on Earth 5,000 years earlier.
I suppose that the Greek gods were worshipped in Greece and eastern Turkey by hundreds of thousands or a few milliion people about 1000 BC about 6,000 years ago. Then the Greeks began establish Greek city states on the shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and the numbers of their worshippers increased a bit.
Alexader the Great Conquered the mighty Persian Empire about 333 to 323 BC, and in the following Helenistic Age there were Greek cities scattered over the Middle East to the borders of central Asia and India. The numbers of worshippers might have increased.
Then the Romans coquered the Meditertanean and the Roman upper class adopted a lot of Greek Culture, becoming bilingual. Latin culture was spread over the western part of the Roman Empire, and that included a bit of Roman Culture. The Roman gods were worshppped officially all over the Empire and were identified with the Greek gods, inclreasing their worshippers.
But in the Classical Age of Greek more and philiosophers doubted the existance of the Greek gods. During the Roman Empire fewer and fewer of the Greek believed in their Greek religion, so it became easy for Christianity to replace it in the eastern section of the Roman Empire between about AD 300 and 500 or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)#:~:text=According to the Greek historian,the Greek island of Paxi.
By about 600 barbarian Avars and Slavs were raiding into the Bulkan, and after 602 Slavs invaded and took over most of the Balkans including most of Greece. And of course they worshppped slavic gods instead of Christ or pagan gods. And beginning in the 630s Muslims from Arabia conquered provence after provence of the eastern Roman Empire. The Muslims tolerated their Christian and Jewish subjects, but would have slaughtered any pagan worshippers they caught.
The Roman Empire retained most of Asia Minor and about AD 800 reconquered most of Greece. But by then most of the pagsn left in Greece would have been worshippers of the Slavic gods, not the Greek ones.
So assuming that the Greek gods decided that their human worshippers were abandoning their worship somewhere between about AD 1 and 800, they would have left Earth and Returned to Pollux IV about 1,567 to 2,367 years before the offical date of "Who Mourns for Adonais?" in AD 2267.
But when Apollo first communicates with the Enterprise,he says:
This implies that Apollo hasn't see a human for 5,000 years.
So 5,000 years after about AD 1 to 800 would be about AD 5001 to AD 5800 for the date of "Who Mourns for Adonais?".
Or 5,000 years before the official date for "Who Mourns for Adonais?" in AD 2367 gives a date of about 2633 BC for when the Greek gods left Earth.
Naturally one would assume that if the Greek gods lived on Earth they would have done so during the period of about 500 BC to AD 500 when they had many worshippers, or that at the earliest they wouldn't have left Earth until the heroic age of Greek myths was over about 1000 BC..Apollo does mention characters from the heroic age.
Possibly there is some confusion about whether the span of 5,000 years is the time since the Greek gods left earth, or the time since Apollo was born, or the time since the older Greek gods came to Earth. Or possibly it is a correct round figure for all three events, and maybe only a few centuries seperated the first coming of th the Greek gods to Earth and their leaving Earth.
If all three events happened within a few centuries of about 2633 BC, a possible outline of the history would be that the Greek gods came ot Earth, settled in Greece, and were worshipped by Greeks for centuries. Then the Greeks stopped worshipping them, and the Greek gods left. But a tiny remnant of the worshippers of the Greek gods preserved their religion, and eventually reconverted the Greeks to worshipping the Greek gods, unknown to the Greek gods who had left Earth too soon to see and enoy the vicotory of their followers.
The point of this is that there is no proof that the Greek gods had anything to do with bringing civilization to the Greeks or with the achievements of Greek culture, despite being worshpped as gods and thus having a lot of ability to influence their worshppers.
So what is Apollo's idea of paradise?
He apparently wants the humans to be hunters or herdsmen at the best. He mentions nothing about agriculture.
I note that the life of a shepherd or other herder is not necessarily all fun and games. When I was a chlld I once saw a sheep which was being used to eat grass and keep a lawn cropped short escape. The owner of the property grabbed the sheep's chain and started draggng the sheep back to the stake the chain had been attached to. And I was surprised by what a struggle it was and how strong the sheep was. I guess that sheep wrangling can be an exhausting job.
And a lot of livestock is larger and more dangerous than sheep. Many people are killed by farm animals like cows, bulls, pigs, horses, camels, etc
And herdsmen have to be on guard to protect their animals from predatory animals, which in some cases have decided to prey on the herdsmen themselves.
It is a common myth that a simple life is a happy life, and that a simple and happy life requires a simple society with simple technology..
But actually a complex society with with complex technology is necessary to have a life style which is either simple or happy. I, personally, have a relatively simple and happy lifestyle because I live in a complex society.
Many people from advanced societies take vacations in tropical lands, and enjoy relaxing in places they call "tropical paradises". But those vacation spots seem like paradises to those who relax there because of the work of the resort employees who may love or hate or have mixed feelinng about their jobs.
In a sufficiently advanced society everyone could be on vacation all the time, supported, not by slaves or serfs or servants or employees, but by computers and robots.
And everyone reading this should know people who are alive today only because of scientific and medicial advances produced by thousands and millions of persons working in specialized fields, supported by the wealth of an advanced technological society.
For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. And it is said that the lives of hunter-gatherers were very pleasant and they only had to work a few hours a day and could goof of and have fun the rest of the time. An easy lifestyle for those who don't mind killing animals and cutting them apart and getitng blood all over themselves, and roasting them on open fires.
But what was the price of such an easy lifestyle? Early death. An adult hunter-gatherer could probably expect to live to be about fifty years old, though of course some died much younger and some died much older. And people in modern advanced societies live on the average a few decades longer than than the average for hunter-gatheerers, though some die much younger and some die much older than the modern average.
And after a few centuries more of advancing civilization, people will no longer need to work any more hours than hunter-gatherers did, but they will live at least as long as contemporary humans, and perhaps their average lifespan will equal or exceed the 137 years of Doctor McCoy. And every second spent being alive is infinitely happier than a second being dead.
But you may note that I said that an adult hunter-gatherer could expect to live to be about fifty.years old. A newborn hunter-gatherer could expect to live only a few months or years and die in childhood. Hunter-gatherer parents were helpless to keep their children alive very well, no matter how much they wanted to.
And for thousands of years parents in civilized cultures which weren't advanced enough were almost equally helpless to keep their children alive, no matter how much they wanted to. Only on the last two centuries, and especially in the last century, has it been possible to keep most of the children who are born alive into adulthood.
For example, one of my great great great grandparents had 20 children born about 200 years ago, and as I remember at least six of them died as children. One of my great grandparents had eight children born a little over a century ago; four of them lived to be over eighty, and four of them died under ten.
So it seems to me that the sooner the Greek gods went to work encouraging the Greeks to become civilized and to keep on advancing, the sooner the majority of humans would stop dying in childhood.
But the episode gives no clear evidence that the Greek gods ever made any effort to promote civilization on Earth.
What is worse, it is believed that prehistoric hunter-gatherers killed a significant percent of their newborn children. Perhaps the territories of their groups could only support a limited number of people, so they killed some of their newborn children to keep the population low enough to avoid starvation. In that case the children were killed due to the parents being helpless to provide for all their children using a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Thus when agricultural developed to produce more and more food, it became possible for farmers to kill fewer or even none of their children but keep all of them alive as long as they could - though they could do little or nohting to stop diseases from killing many of their children.
But members of civilized societies continued to kill many of their children for thousands of years. It was not until the last two millennia that more and more societies abandoned infanticide. Ancient Greek and Roman writers considered it was very strange that the Egyptians raised all of their children.
So the Greek gods apparently did nothing to forbid infanticide, the second most common cause of human deaths after disease, in ancient Greece.
So I don't think that Apollo and the Geek gods showed a lot of compassion toward their human worshppers. They had the advantage of advanced technology giveing them great powers and lifespans of thousands of years, and yet they might never have done anything to share the benefits of their technology with their subjects and improve their lifestyles and lifespans..
One theory to make the Greek gods seem less indifferent to suffering and death could be tha tthey were not a few members of a society which slowly advanced over many millennia on Pollux IV, until they achieved god like powers and vast lifespans. Such beings would likely have records of what more primitive life was like and how their society advanced.
Instead an advanced society could have visited Pollux IV and found a small band of hunter-gatherers on the edge of extincion, the last survviors of their species, and uplifted them, giving them vast powers and great longevity and.set them loose to observe what they would do with their powers. The Greek gods might not have understood their technology and they might have considered their longevitiy a gift from beings who the Greek gods considered to be gods - gods to the gods, so to speak. And the Greek gods might have thought that if their "gods" didn't give such longevity to Earth humans it wasn't the place of the Greek gods to go against that "devine" decision.
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