The essays in volume 25 of Yale Classical Studies were specially commissioned by the editors to provide a cross-section of contemporary approaches to the interpretation of Greek tragedy. All three Attic dramatists receive attention, some essays being studies of a play as a whole, others concentrating on some particular passage or theme. Greek passages are translated so this volume should be of use and interest not only to classical specialists but also to students in any literary field.

L.A. Cops is primarily a work of fiction; with a few exceptions, the names of my characters as well as most of the cities and counties in the San Joaquin Valley are figments of my imagination. If the reader believes that I have written about actual places, as well as real crimes, that is his right to do so. I can only say in my defense that all writers have stored in their memory-cells recollections of actual events, and frequently borrow from those storage banks ideas that eventually go together to make up a story, or even an entire novel. That’s how writers of fiction make a living; unless the work is pure science-fiction, the more closely it resembles real-life situations, the more likely it will sell, because we all experience something inside when we can relate to the characters, events, or locales in a story. I have used real situations—and in several instances—actual places in the chapters that deal with World War II. Of course, built within that framework, I’ve taken the liberty to make my characters more colorful, gallant, or tyrannical than may have been the actual case. I wasn’t old enough during that period to have had personal experiences of this nature, but some of the military individuals I’ve introduced you to may approximately match some that I ran into during my own years in the Air Force. After all, no one period in time has its own special hold on good, decent people, nor on those who have made life less than great for those they have come in contact with. You will find both types playing important roles in my book.

Adjudication between conflicting normative universes that do not share the same vocabulary, standards of rationality, and moral commitments cannot be resolved by recourse to traditional principles. Such cases are always in a sense tragic. And what is called for, in our pluralistic and conflictual world is not to be found, as many would suppose, in an impersonal set of procedures with which all participants could be treated as having rationally agreed. The very idea of such a neutral system is an illusion. Rather, what is needed, Julen Etxabe argues in this book, is a heightened awareness of the difficulty of judgment. The Experience of Tragic Judgments draws upon Sophocles’ play Antigone in order to consider this difficulty and the virtues that attend its acknowledgment. Based on the transformative experience that the audience undergoes in engaging with this play what is proposed is a reconceptualization of judgment: not as it is generally thought to occur in a single isolated moment, like the falling of an axe, but rather as an experience that develops in and through space and time.