Ever since the ancient Romans imposed their language on neighboring barbarians, the teaching of Latin has been inseparable from cultural politics. In the Middle Ages, Latin was the preserve of the Church, whose leaders believed that the language was inherently holier than the vernacular, and who used Latin as a means of establishing a distance between priests and their parishioners. In the Renaissance, the classics were seen as a beneficial source of eternal, universal truths — "From Cicero I’ve learned to be myself," an Italian humanist announced —and such a belief persisted well into the nineteenth century. The argument for the improving qualities of Latin is still made by the American Classical League, which points to studies showing that schoolchildren who have studied Latin achieve higher standardized test scores than their non-Latinist peers.