This chapter examines the theological and political ramifications of Sancho’s imaginings of the afterlife. While he doesn’t believe in Hell, Sancho uses the figurative language of infernal character to criticize chattel slavery, religious bigotry, and British colonialism. When he describes Heaven, meanwhile, Sancho projects himself and his readers into an ideal religious collective that includes American Quakers, enslaved West Africans, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and Muslim clerics, as well as fellow Anglican Protestants. Attending to Sancho’s notion of the afterlife reveals the distinctiveness of his religious thought among Black anti-slavery intellectuals. His pluralistic definition of religious virtue allows him to extend belonging further than his contemporaries – beyond co-religionists and even beyond the category of the Christian. Logics of mixture and mingling in Sancho’s letters enable him to enlarge divine love and salvation without universalizing belief, holding a multiracial and trans-denominational community together without eliding differences.

Insofar as his poems generally take the mimetic form of a monologue unfolding in the present, Pindaric poetry is the Pindaric speaking voice. Far more of the corpus, furthermore, is directly concerned with the speaking subject than with any other individual. But the identity and functions of this prominent and indeed all-encompassing voice have been a persistent source of fascination and puzzlement, not least in their relationship to Pindar of Thebes as a historical individual. Better understanding the scare quotes around the ‘I’ in the title of this chapter can help us to better understand Pindar’s poetry. Scholars have formulated various ways to refer to the speaking voice, and the accumulation of terminology reflects the complexity of the topic. This chapter offers a taxonomy of voices and then criticises that taxonym. It discusses the ‘bardic I’, the ‘first-person indefinite’, the authorial voice, and the choral voice and then argues that the victor never speaks in epinicians. A conclusion briefly ties these threads together.

This chapter investigates Pindar’s construction of the relationships by which communities are constituted: relationships between families, individuals, and the polis; between the inhabitants of the polis and their past; and between different polis communities.  It surveys civic values, as well as the passages where Pindar discusses specific constitutional forms.  Because Pindar’s lyric expresses political issues through the lens of poetic concerns, assimilating civic and military conflict to vicissitude, it maps some of the strategies by which Pindar subsumes the political into the poetic.  A final focus is the nature of Pindar’s Panhellenism and the connection of Panhellenism to elite mobility.  Pindar’s Panhellenism projects competitively local claims for eminence into a broad Greek arena and characterises the mythico-historical past of Greek cities as one of migration and elite movement. The interaction of local identity with the Panhellenic arena is thus driven by the mobility of heroic and then athletic elites.

In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

This introduction briefly glances at Pindar’s poetry and its later reception so as to set the scene for the volume that follows. Before outlining the shape of the book and its chapters, it surveys the recent history of Pindaric criticism so as to provide the reader with a sense of its wider intellectual context.

References to Ignatius Sancho’s wife, children, and family life are interweaved throughout his letters. Sancho often wrote to his friends, briefly updating them on his family’s well-being and activities. When these brief references are collated and analyzed, an underrepresented perspective of Sancho’s family as a middling Black family emerges, where the Sanchos each embody the ideal representation of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and children. These references to the Sancho family in the Letters help make the Sancho family one of eighteenth-century London’s most well-documented Black families. More importantly, the family’s representation in the Letters answers essential questions about how the Black family were perceived in society and the role class, race, and gender play in shaping childhood, parental relationships, and family life. This chapter details the representations of Blackness, fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood observed in the Sancho family.

Greek melic poetry is characterized by its pragmatic features. It is thus natural to find strong differentiation within it: this is what we mean by the word genre in this context. Pindar’s genres are distinguished by their occasion, whether ‘secular’ or cultic; by their mode of performance; and by the identity of the chorus. These distinctive elements could overlap to produce hybrids. When Pindar’s oeuvre was gathered and catalogued during the Alexandrian period, each ode needed to be sorted into a ‘genre’, as indicated by its dominant characteristics. Of the seventeen books into which Pindar’s work was subdivided, the four books of epinicians have reached us practically intact by way of medieval transmission; of the other books, fragments of various lengths come from the papyri or indirect transmission, posing very different problems. In the case of the papyri, the main difficulty lies in the material conditions of fragmentation and legibility. When it comes to indirect transmission, we must consider the intentions of the quotation and the reliability of the witnesses, which is greater if stylistic or grammatical in nature, lesser if philosophical or otherwise ideological.

Ignatius Sancho is the subject of a fabulous 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough now in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. He has also been associated with images by Hogarth, and copies of his business card for his Westminster shop, sometimes attributed to Hogarth, are held in the V&A and the British Museum. This chapter explores Sancho’s relationship to eighteenth-century London’s visual culture not only through images by Gainsborough and Hogarth, but also through Sancho’s own rhetorical style, and the networks and relationships with artist correspondents that emerge through his letters, arguing that Sancho emerges as an agent as well as a subject in eighteenth-century British visual culture.

This chapter examines key ideas concerning the dialect and metre in which Pindar’s poems were written, as well as the story of the transmission of his works from his day, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, then down to our own times.

This chapter looks at a series of English poets who have identified Pindar as a poet of freedom – both metrical and political – before turning to some modern Greek poets who have been influenced by this aspect of the English Pindaric tradition. Among the poets discussed are Abraham Cowley, Thomas Gray, A. E. Stallings, Andreas Kalvos, and Angelos Sikelianos.

Ignatius Sancho’s correspondents spanned the British Empire, from India to the Caribbean and North America. One of the earliest reviewers of the posthumous publication of Sancho’s Letters in 1782 remarked that “Sancho may be styled—what is very uncommon for men of his complexion, A man of letters. His commerce with the Muses was supported amid the trivial and momentary interruptions of a shop.” The publication of Sancho’s correspondence revealed him to also be a lettered man. The contents and style of his writings demonstrate that he was truly a man of letters in every sense of the phrase. The demographic, geographic, and social diversity of Sancho’s correspondents ultimately substantiates the observation he made to Margaret Cocksedge on July 31, 1775: “I have lived with the great—and been favoured by beauty.”

Sancho’s Letters begins with an extensive list of “Subscribers Names,” crediting 1,181 individuals who financed the book as a source of funds for Sancho’s widow and children. This chapter examines that list and the process of publishing “by subscription,” highlighting Sancho’s differences from other 1782 subscription publications and the later Black British authors Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano. In Sancho’s list, the variety of honorifics associated with each name reveal that the book’s supporters came from a broad spectrum of social ranks – and that a strikingly high percentage of them were women. Several specific individuals are discussed to illustrate the motives of Sancho’s subscribers: patronage and clout; friendship and philanthropy; and abolitionist politics. Despite the later embrace of Sancho’s book by abolitionists, this chapter contends that its subscriber list is more strongly shaped by a sentimental literary milieu and the social ties of the book’s editor.