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S. President Thomas Jefferson, kept him at the cutting edge of Western ideology. 6 Mainland Greece, unlike Italy, France, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, had remained isolated from the mainstream of Western ideas. The Ottoman hegemony, which lasted until 1830, had deprived the Greek intelligentsia of access to the manuscripts of ancient authors that Eastern scholars had carried off from the disintegrating Byzantine empire. Since the 1453 fall of Constantinople, the Tourkokratia had effectively insulated native Greek territory from Western European historical movements—most important, from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Before Voltaire and Rousseau, seventeenth-century French dramatic theorists either had excluded Aristophanes from their purview or had regarded comedy as much less worthy of critical and scholarly attention than tragedy. In his Pratique du th´eatre ˆ (1657), for example, l’Abb´e d’Aubignac had focused on Attic comedy to make an overt and prolonged attack against the ancients, who had shamefully enjoyed Aristophanes’ “abuse” of Socrates. E. comedy as a primitive genre anticipating the more sophisticated New Comedy of Menander and the Romans.

7 In his view, the French Enlightenment had the most to impart to the Neohellenic quest for liberal nationhood and cultural self-realization, so he held up French literary, philo- 20 · Chapter 1 sophical, scientific, and ethical accomplishments as models to admire and emulate. The French Enlightenment also laid bare the urgent need for Neohellenic intellectuals to define the proper relationship not only between the new nation and Western Europe, but also between the modern Greeks and their Western-invented ancient ancestors.