Divine Madness & Creativity In Ancient Greece

In Ancient Greece, was it “divine madness” that bestowed creativity? 

Socrates and Plato wrote that inspired thoughts originated when a person was beside themselves – in a state of divine madness. Reason was suspended. So, Plato considered that art was an imitation of an imitation – twice removed. In Poetics, Aristotle championed art as a valuable way to experience emotions, integral to tragedy and poetry.

Myth and religion, art and architecture, philosophy and science, theater and music – it would take a library to delve into all this from ancient Greece. What would be the impulse or common ground for all this? 

In the eyes and minds of ancient Greek people, it would have fallen under the umbrella of what they labelled mousikē: the sphere of the (usually nine) divine Muses who had their abode on Mount Helicon – where famously poet Hesiod claimed to have actually met them. It was Muses too that Homer invoked at the start of both the Iliad and Odyssey – as the cause of his poetic inspiration and craft. The Muses each had their individual circle of expertise and interest, but all operated literally under the sign of Memory (Mnemosyne in Greek), because that was their mother’s name. 

Their father was Zeus, though his role was more that of one-time progenitor than of cultural mentor. I wrote ‘almost all’: two significant exceptions were (visual) artworks and architecture, and in a different way philosophy. Philosophers had no one divine inspirer – they might look at different times towards Athena, Apollo or even Zeus for intellectual aid. Craftsmen in metal, stone or wood (kheirotechnai) were thought to need a different kind of inspiration from ‘makers’ (poiētai) of words, and this came from either Athena or Hephaestus (Homer’s lame craftsman god, maker of Achilles’s arms and armour) or both.

To revert to the Muses: epic poetry was taken care of by Calliope, love poetry by Erato, lyric poetry by Euterpe, sacred poetry/hymns by Polyhymnia, tragic drama by Melpomene, comedy by Thalia, and dance (manifested in the dramatic or singing chorus, a word which originally meant ‘dance’) by Terpsichore (‘she who delights in the dance’). 

Something of an outlier – or an uplier – was Ourania, meaning literally ‘heavenly’ and so the presiding Muse of astronomy. Astronomy – literally the disposition/arrangement of stars – was not an original Greek specialism. Rather, it was a manifestation of another key aspect of the ancient Greeks’ creative genius – their ability to borrow and take over something already very finely developed or crafted by another culture and then re-make it something new, and often something superior.