Put the Cart Before the Horse

An old idea with classical roots. The Roman statesman Cicero references the same reversed-order logic in his essay On Friendship (44 BC), and the Ancient Greeks had their own term for it, "hysteron proteron," reversing the natural order of events. In English, John Heywood's 1546 collection of proverbs records "set the cart before the horse" directly, and the writer George Puttenham explicitly links the English phrase to its Greek equivalent in his 1589 work The Arte of English Poesie. A medieval version of the same idea used oxen and a yoke instead of a cart and horse.