Albeit linked to ancient Western cultures and languages, the word “creativity”
did not inspire any connotation of creation and practical making before Chris-tian times� In English, the word create is traced back to Chaucer (1340?-1400), who used it in 1393 (Runco & Albert 2010, p� 6) but its use was not followed by any conceptual debate about creativity� All the ancient Western cultures shared a common disinterest in human creation, believed to be solely epiphenomenal in relation to the will and deeds of the gods� Creativity as we usually define it today did not exist as a concept in pre-Christian cultures, where artists and po-ets (and also scientists and philosophers) were seen simply as conduits of divine inspiration� Artists, whose artisan skills defined both their profession and social status, were not known by their birth-name, for the simple reason that no indi-vidual stood out in the expression of singular genius� Before Homer (supposedly
eighth century B�C�), poets used to compose collectively or in collective situa-tions, such as performances at court or public competitions� The aoidos was a poet of rhythmical compositions performed to the musical background of a small string instrument called cithara. He (normally a “he”) should not be mistaken for a singer - rather his compositions might have sounded like modern rap or the works of a medieval bard: lyrical text recited with a musical background� Poetry was improvised following set rules that served several purposes� Firstly, as these compositions were oral performances, one purpose must have been the mnemonic retention of content and indeed set formulas and rhetorical devices were repeated in a syntactic structure that facilitated comprehension and retrieval� Another pur-pose must have been the expression of the community’s values and ideology, as these works were fully integrated into the culture of belonging: themes drawn from religious beliefs and consensual views on historical and mythological narra-tives� A third one was the amusement of the community, which in case of ancient Greece consisted of wealthy, free males� The activity of assembling and combin-ing oral poems was neither individual nor original, as we understand originality today� Poetry-making was a collective enterprise, a sort of group handicraft car-ried out either by specialised artisans or by skilled autodidacts� Nobody stood out from the professional group� Only one situation constituted an exception: poetry competitions� There the rules of the game allowed only the performance of excel-lence and put poets up against each other, professionals against amateurs� The act of creation consisted of putting together existing thematic and rhetorical blocks (replication and incrementation) and of attuning to the field of poets and of the broader society� Murray (1981) points out the specific quality of these poets’ crea-tivity, which was perceived as a sort of divine (or devilish) inspiration�
Runco and Albert point to the tipping point of the conceptualisation of cre-ativity that was to bring the early Western cultures closer to a contemporary understanding of it: “It is when the Greeks placed emphasis on an individual’s daimon (guardian spirit) that the idea of genius became mundane and was pro-gressively associated with an individual’s abilities and appetites, both destructive and constructive” (Runco & Albert 2010)� Before that, Greek poets defined their creation as a divine process - the individual poet was just a conduit through which the divinities expressed themselves� Names of poets before Homer are mostly unknown throughout antiquity because their works were ephemeral in their being oral, but also because the poets thought “signing” their works to be pointless, as they felt that the individual had little if no responsibility for them�
The initial call to the Muses, which Homer retains in the Iliad “Sing, goddess, the wrath [anger] of Achilles Peleus’ son” in 800 BC (Homer 1995, p� 1) was more than an habitual opening, it was an ideological statement: as a poet he was
simply the hand guided by the gods’ will and he called for the gods to appear and trigger his creative process� Genius at that time was not the extraordinary individual’s ability to create, but the “mystical powers of protection and good fortune” (Runco & Albert 2010, p� 5) to be almost ritually called for at the begin-ning of a poetic composition�
Interestingly, the first transmission to posterity of a poet’s name in histori-cal documents was probably due to a sort of branding operation initiated by a group of professional poets, tired of being challenged in competitions by less professional ones, the autodidacts (Tarditi 1973, p� 13)� The latter, whose pres-ence is still documented in Homer’s Odyssey (Homer 1992, XXII) were proud to owe their skills solely to divine will, while the former considered themselves as professional artisans, whose technique derived from their hard-won learning and imitation of established masters� In this competition amongst artists we can read the early building up of a professional awareness that had consequences for the artists’ conception of their creativity� One of the ancient poets’ “corpora-tions” claimed its descent from Homer, the blind poet who exceptionally and brilliantly had recorded myth and history from earlier oral traditions in written, rather than spoken, words� Homer is simply too perfect an image of a Greek genius to be true and indeed scholars have doubted of his historical truth since 1664 (Tarditi 1973, p� 18)� Today the prevailing theory looks on Homer not as a real individual but as a myth, whose name indicates a family of poets that used to transmit its knowledge from generation to generation and participate in po-etry competitions� The name, or better “surname”, of Homer probably indicates this family, the Homeridaes, which used to meet up at the poetry competitions, indeed the Greek verb omereo means “to meet”�
How is this story relevant to our understanding of creativity? Simply by ac-knowledging that ancient Greece did not construct the notion of creativity as we do today and by addressing the several myths around artistic creativity� Not only was creativity as novelty and disruption not valued in ancient Greece, it did not even exist in its conceptual heritage� The Greeks valued respect for traditions, apprenticeship to masters, repetition of rhetorical formulas and solutions, recog-nition of well known themes and musical harmony� Composition was collective and collectively shared, mostly anonymous and felt to be divinely driven� Myths around poets and acts of creation were instrumentally used to transmit knowl-edge by means of lyrical images�
Already we can see the emergence of a few issues of great importance for crea-tivity debates in the centuries to come: who is responsible for the act of creation, God or man? Is artistic creativity spontaneous, as in the case of autodidacts, or knowledge-based and driven, as in the case of hard-working professional poets?
Another question the ancient view on artistic creation raises is whether creativity can be associated with positive or negative values� As already quoted above from Runco and Albert (2010, p� 5) the concept of genius was strictly related to divine protection, or to a daimon� Originally, daimon was a guardian spirit, a supernatural power that could be as much vehicle of protection as of destruction� The latter meaning still survives in current words such as demon or demonic and shows the complex character of creative composition� This mys-terious and multifaceted quality around artistic creativity kept growing in the pre-Christian cultures, to the point of becoming a synonym for madness: furor poeticus was defined as the state of being in a creative process (Murray 1981, p� 22)� In both cases, whether the gods or poetic frenzy had inspired creation, creation had little to do with artistry alone� Inspiration has always been central to the conceptualisation of artistic creativity, to the point of being mythologised by Romanticism� However, inspiration is only one of the many attributes of crea-tivity, together with the above-mentioned genius and craftsmanship� In the an-cient Roman view of creative processes, genius is perceived as “an illustrious male’s creative power” (Runco & Albert 2010, p� 5), which can be transmitted to posterity� Cicero (106-43 BC) incarnates this image as an intellectual and in his works he constructs a theory of composition, called by him rhetorica� In Cicero’s many books on rhetoric, the art of composing an effective speech, composition is essentially a rational act that follows commonly agreed rules within a specific style� Nevertheless, his rhetoric envisages a humanistic approach that makes use of “cultural creativity” (Gianotti & Pennacini 1981, p� 52) and philosophy� With the purpose of acting for the common good –which for Cicero is to keep the status quo– and the aim of persuasion (the technique of manipulating the audi-ence’s consensus), the art of rhetorical composition must integrate creative ele-ments in order to stimulate an emotional response, or commotion� If the final aim of rhetoric is persuasion, then content knowledge is not at all fundamental�
What counts is not exact or scientific knowledge but the ability to describe, to present subject matter and to move the audience� The whole of Latin culture was subsequently to be influenced by Cicero’s humanistic rhetoric and both literary practices and aesthetic or rhetoric theories would either follow a “technical” ap-proach (strict adherence to the rules of composition: invention, disposition and memory) or a “cultural” approach (creative indulging in stylistic refinements)�
According to Cicero, creativity is due to the poet’s natural talent (natura) and to a sort of divine breath as inspiration (quasi divino quodam spiritu inflari), as Gianotti and Pennacini (1981, p� 69) note� The first implication of this view is that art cannot be learned or taught� The inspired poet is so by nature, ac-cording to his (once again we basically have to do with a male gender defined
culture) outlining qualities� The second implication is that all kinds of human expression - rhetorical, poetic, dramaturgical, visual - must be both useful and agreeable� In contemporary terms, the useful/agreeable pair has been replaced by other concepts with a similar relationship, agreeability being substituted by novelty, originality or exceptional quality, and usefulness being nuanced by the notions of adaptability or appropriateness� The third implication is that reflec-tions on artistic creativity focus on composition and issues related to the process of composition� Individual creativity is necessarily excluded, for the simple rea-son that artists were not seen as independent creators of original works, but as the spokesmen of the gods� This is confirmed by the fact that art history does not collect any early documentation on individual artists, who are mostly anony-mous to us, but rather gathers information on collective works of art�
Runco and Albert maintain that “the earliest Western conception of creativity was the Biblical story of creation given in Genesis, from which followed the idea of the artisan doing God’s work on earth” (Runco & Albert 2010, p� 5)� Of course, in Genesis the metaphor of a single God creating the whole world from nothing is powerful and well attuned to the Western perception of creation, as opposed for instance to the Buddhist view of creation as generation out of something already existing, within an organic system of natural cycles� The male individual who creates ex nihilo was the perfect personification of the creator for cultures be-ing constructed by the growbe-ing monotheistic religions� However, early Christian (and some later versions throughout the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries) understanding of artistic creation was still that of a mediation of God’s voice and will� This approach lies behind a religious and moralistic interpretation of artistic processes and performances� By contrast, Habermas’s interpretation of Aristotle (384/3-322 BC) as the theorist who challenged Plato’s mimesis and shifted the artistic process from reproduction to creation might be seen as the first seed of a Western secular view of artistic creativity� According to Plato (c� 427-347 BC) art is nothing but imitation (mimesis) of ideal forms and artists waste their time imitating the imperfect forms of sensible reality� As a consequence, Plato did not value artistic creation and spoke of it disparagingly� The relationship between life and artistic creation was further reflected upon in Aristotle, whose opinion is radically different from Plato� He distinguishes simple imitation from complete fulfilment of the artistic creation (Carlson 1984, pp� 16-17)� Even though Aristo-tle’s artists are not completely free to generate originally, they behold a closer link to the material reality, which they portray “as it should be”, according to criteria of needs and verisimilitude� So artistic creativity according to Aristotle allows individual invention and application of fantasy� Nature is constantly flowing and often unfinished; art can shape the unfinished and can anticipate its fulfilment�
Fantasy, though, must keep a close link to reality; art does not need to be true, but needs to be verisimilar, that is plausible� Aristotle and Plato single out one of the recurring issues in the artistic creativity dispute: the dialectic nature/nurture�
Moreover, they contribute to the future debate with concepts still used today:
mimesis, verisimilitude and catharsis�