The Basil Plant is a Modern Greek masterpiece that combined social and ideological drama at a time when the genre had yet to flourish in Western Europe. It is an unexpected amalgam of popular and scholarly tradition, full of vivid depictions and dramatic tension, with a happy ending – one of the main features of a comedy. Written in local dialect, it was inspired by the Enlightenment and was the first dramatic work in Greece to protest about the position of women in society. Set in the Zakynthos of 1712, which was then under Venetian rule, it explores the rigidly stratified class system of the era, comprising the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the common people. Class dominates all the oppositions around which the play is structured: truth vs superstition; justice and freedom vs property; education vs the entrenched stereotypes that maintain power; and the humanism of the younger generation vs the tyranny of the old. The Basil Plant records the moment at which the status quo is overturned and an entire system of being comes tumbling down. With its influences ranging from Dionysios Solomos, the theatre of the Cretan Renaissance, and commedia dell’arte to the French romantic school and the European Enlightenment, an air of liberty, justice and humanity blows through the work and resonates even today.