The basic conflict

The first words we hear from the West are of a war (the Trojan War) in a time so long ago that archeology is needed to determine whether there is any truth to it at all. We know that it is a story, a work of art that was itself created at some unknown time in the past. Yet it seems to describe, with great detail and reality, a time and a culture that really existed.
Where these men came from who fought on those far shores of the Aegean Sea, we are not sure. They are counted as the ancestors of the Greeks, a civilization of such advancement and accomplishment that it seems incredible that it happened so long ago. For though it was first, many believe that it is still the greatest. The Greek language was (and is) a thing of beauty in itself, capable of sophisticated nuances of meaning and of expressions of beauty few languages in the history of mankind can match. We justifiably credit the Greek heritage with breathing anew life and inspiration into Western arts, culture, thought and politics nearly two millennia after that glorious time.
If the Greeks were so advanced, how can it be that we do not know where they came from? They came almost out of nowhere and flowered and bore fruit as though they had roots of incredible depth.
A few things have been pieced together by archeologists. There were peoples in the Aegean, on its many islands. There were peoples on the Greek mainland. And there were some people who came from the north at some point.
The first civilization on Western soil actually began in Crete. We call it a civilization because it had writing and palaces and a heirarchical society. But we can’t decipher their writing, so all we know about them is what archeologists can glean from their digs.
We do not even know if it could be called a Western civilization at all. We know that it was on Western soil, and that their written language was native to their culture, not imported from elsewhere. But are these facts enough to make it classifiable as a Western culture?
Crete is close to Egypt, which was already advanced in those days. Egyptian objects are found amongst their ruins, and references to Crete can be found in Egyptian writings.
The spread of civilization from its cradles in Mesopotamia and Egypt seems to have made its way to the island of Crete. The Egyptians had ships; they sailed out from the Nile. They traded with people in the region. The practice of writing things down is a thing that can be learned.
Civilization spread, and as it spread, people of many different cultural heritages came into contact with it. And it was adapted and used by them in their own ways.
But it may have been that there was a cultural area far from civilization’s ground zero which, though it did not use writing, was yet of considerable complexity and capable of intelligence usually considered to be reserved for literate peoples.
It is said of the ancient Celts that they preferred not to write things down, and it is because of that that their civilization is lost to us. It is also said that the songs of Homer are from an oral tradition that goes back far into prehistory, and that its forms are such that they facilitate memorization. There are such forms and stories in other Western traditions--the Germanic, the Irish, the Norse and others.
The Greeks may have come from a well that was deep, but of which we have no written record. They were on the eastern-most fringe of the Western world, and as they came into contact with people who wrote things down and built elaborate palaces and organized themselves into large political entities and studied ancient tomes of wisdom, the Greeks learned to do those things, too.
But the Greeks, because they were from a different culture which had grown and developed sufficiently to be aware of and confident in its own differences, did not copy but rather built new things with the new tools they encountered in the East.
They were a relatively small force against the power of the East. It was only by heroics of the most outstanding sort that they defended themselves against the might of Persia.

What is the essential difference between the East and West? I believe the difference is captured in a simple quote from the Greek historian Herodotus. A pair of Spartans brought before the Persian king, explaining why they refused to bow down to him, said, “It is not our custom to worship men.”
The first point about this is that it reveals a difference in custom. The Spartans were not necessarily asserting that it is absolutely wrong for anyone to worship men. They were saying that it was not their custom. The East has that custom; the West does not. There lies the essential difference.
In the Eastern custom, the king or emperor was thought to be a god. Western traditions generally hold that rulers are human, and while there is a realm of the divine, it is separate from this world.
Much of Western history, from the time of Xerxes’ invasion of the Hellenic world to the fall of the Third Reich, can be viewed as a struggle between the Eastern tradition of the divinity of the emperor and Western traditions of individuality, democracy and the rule of law.
The essential difference is in a Western tendency, present apparently from prehistoric times, to hold that authority stems basically from the people, not from the ruler or from on high.
Or, if it does come from on high, it is from an infinite authority that is not legitimately represented by any government, that can speak directly to any person, thus making the people sovereign rather than any earthly ruler.