Cheque-books have been sharpened in America to lure top professors to top universities, and the ones attracting the most attention are those ‘great communicators’ with a reputation based only loosely on specialised knowledge: e.g. those who have released ‘rap’ records, or undergone sex-change operations, or achieved something of comparable intellectual value. The ancient Greek sophists, too, knew all about what would sell.
The sophists were freelance professional educators, with a commitment to teaching pupils to make a successful public career for themselves by becoming great ‘communicators’. They charged hefty fees both for this and for giving seminars and displays of public eloquence, while developing their own specialist interests in the various hot topics of the day, e.g. ‘Can I believe the evidence of my own eyes?’, ‘Is there such a thing as absolute truth?’, ‘How do words come to have meaning?’, ‘What can we know about the gods?’, ‘What part should pleasure play in life?’, and so on.
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