I shall first attempt to explain what is meant by the West.

Oikeutta vaikka millä mitalla

The Western world is, yes, the heir of Greece and Rome — but less than you imagine, and far more than you are capable of picturing.

Greece was not the cradle of democracy, not even Athens. Athens, so often invoked in this context, was in fact an oligarchy and a slave society, in which the most influential women were courtesans.
Rome, by contrast — an imperial rogue state whose economy rested upon slavery and the constant yield of wars of aggression — was in many respects far more the progenitor of our democracy. Illegitimate, perhaps, but a progenitor nonetheless. For Rome created the idea of Europe: the idea of central authority, of empire, but also of Roman law — the very foundation upon which Europe was built for the following fifteen centuries, or perhaps twenty-one, depending on how one counts.

I could write four hundred pages at this point on the Romans alone, and another fifteen hundred on fascinating digressions — for instance, on Roman noble families whose descendants still shape Europe today. That would, admittedly, be rather enjoyable. But it would not be useful, for we may instead speak of Roman law — and that is where matters become truly interesting.

Before the Romans, law was not a system but a bundle: customs, religious injunctions, rules of vengeance, and the commands of kings. Even the famed Code of Hammurabi was not a system, but a catalogue of existing legal practices.

The decisive shift lay in this: Roman law did not seek guilt, but responsibility. The difference is enormous — quite diabolically so — though most people fail to grasp it.

The Romans created the concepts of property, debt, contract, and liability. They also established legal categories — persons, things, and legal acts — and, crucially, developed legal reasoning itself: if this, then that.

The Western world was born when Rome collapsed but the law remained. When the western half of the Roman Empire went bankrupt, it fell into the hands of Germanic tribes. Yet these tribes largely took possession of Roman estates and grafted Roman law onto their own customary traditions — law that many of them already knew from service as mercenaries in the Roman army before the collapse.

Many concepts we now regard as self-evident — ownership, contract, liability, inheritance — were already articulated in ancient Rome.

Roman law emerged above all from practical necessity. An expanding empire required a system capable of regulating trade, land ownership, family relations, and debt. Thus arose a form of law that was not merely religious or moral regulation, but a rational system in which cases were resolved according to general principles. This mode of thought — that law is a coherent and logical whole — has passed directly into modern legislation.

And because Roman law was a system that could be applied and taught, the Germanic successors who took over the imperial remnants adopted it, adding only their own layer.

Germanic law contributed the notion that law arises from the customs and practices of the people, not solely from the decrees of the state or the writings of jurists — a development that would later give rise to customary law and the common law tradition.

But in sum, the foundation of Western society is not Greek democracy, but Roman law.