The Secret History Of The Roman Empire

“I was considerably taken with how you never know the sure meaning of a Latin sentence until you hear the last syllable of the last word. In Latin if you want to say, ‘I drink poison from the glass,’ you can put it in any order you wish. For example: ‘Poison from the glass drink I.’ Then the listener wouldn’t know who took poison until ‘drink I’ is spoken. That means people had to be alert. It was very easy to trick your neighbor. Now the Romans were the first nation to live consistently in terms of world conquest, and perhaps there was a certain unconscious conspiracy to construct the language that way. So that only the people who were most alert, most unscrupulous, most tricky, and most concerned with getting their way would be adept in the tongue. It was a language for people seeking power and ready to use all means to obtain it.”
                                                                            —Norman Mailer, Pontifications