A lot of the English language words has a Latin base, which was the language of Rome. The father of democracy and thus the western tradition was Cleisthenes. Rome controlled much of the Mediterranean, so much so that they called it "mare nostrum" meaning "our sea". Because of their wide swath of land they controlled, there was a sort of "legacy" of Rome when it fell. People in Europe wanted to be like the old Roman Empire. We see this with the "Holy Roman Empire" and the Byzantine Empire calling themselves rhomaioi which means Roman. Likewise, the Roman empire set up road ways and a connection of people and cultures that allowed Christianity to spread. On top of that, despite their eventual collapse, they were the winners. People look to them because much of the Western Tradition comes from their initial foundation of politics, philosophies (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), art, and engineering.

I hope that brief overview helps a little bit. There is more you can go in-depth on each topic.

The alphabet you are using right now is the Latin alphabet (the one used by the Romans), which in turn was developed out of the Phoenician and Greek alphabet (which too originated mostly out of the Phoenician). Romance languages are those originated or heavily influenced by Latin, among them are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, etc. Many others have a heavy influence from them, English for example has a vocabulary with 26% of words having origin in Latin and 6% in Greek, this numbers are a bit shaky as the other larger sources are German and French, the latter being a Romance language with German influence.

Most political offices and structures are built in the image of the Roman laws and institutions (which were heavily influenced by the Greek ones). In music, scales can be divided into major and minor ones (though several others exist, but in the west these have the most widespread use) which originated as the Ionian and Aeolian modes.

Mathematics and science both have a major Greek source. The discovery of earth roundness, contrary to common believe, was achieved by the Greeks (who show to have a notion of it's roundness) and a pretty accurate circumference was calculated by Eratosthenes with a margin of error (depending on how large a stade, his unit of measurement, actually was) of 2%-20% of the actual size.

I could go on and on, but the just of it is that no matter where you look, most likely is that it's origin was either Greek or Roman.