Blown away by your analysis, Curtis Dozier. I’m a little mad that I can’t take your class on this topic. (I think I’ll share this piece with a Classics professor I know who teaches a course on the American presidency.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes someone “presidential” and why people seem to think that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have it. I’ve struggled with this a lot, and your piece helps me think it through a little more clearly, and connects it to her “trustworthiness” in a way I’ve never even considered before.

In the American worldview, even though we don’t gender our adjectives like the Greeks do, it seems to me that presidential, on its own, can only be declined as masculine. As you pointed out, this mindset has a lot to do with the leaders we’ve seen historically, which is fair. (Though I tend to lean toward the argument that the gendering of these virtues is also rooted in a deep-seated misogyny that’s been around longer than Athens.)

Even though Americans don’t learn about virtues in quite the same directly gendered way, our outlook isn’t that far from the outlook of the ancients. The English word honor is often overtly gendered in our culture, for example. Maybe it’s harder to pinpoint because we don’t use grammatical gender as much, but the meaning it there.

You’ll get haters on this piece saying “I didn’t learn rhetoric that way and I don’t speak Greek but I still think HRC’s a bitch!” …but as a woman and as a student of Classics, I just wanted to say, thank you.