ABSTRACT
Samuel P. Huntington's famous essay on the 'clash of civilizations' is inevitably called into question when it comes to discussing the thorny issue of the 'conflict of cultures'. The cohesion and the rationality of the Greeks triumphed over the undisciplined hordes of Orientals, while the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides bequeathed us with the first conflict of civilizations according to Western tradition. The opposition between Greeks and barbarians was also much more blurred than is conveyed by the rhetoric about Greece's cultural superiority. The radical opposition between West and East is, for the most part, a historiographic invention constructed around the idea of the Graeco-Roman tradition as the foundation of the West. The Romans, who at the time of their first contacts with the Greek world were considered by the latter as themselves barbarians, were on their part, more interested in political than cultural hegemony.
