In the wake of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," poets of the seventh and sixth centuries BC composed epics which covered other parts of the Trojan War story or different areas of Greek mythology. Quotations from them and other testimonies as to their content survive in later authors and the evidence thus assembled allows us to reconstruct something of the poems' contents. Collectively these poems came to be known by Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria as 'The Epic Cycle'. With their often grotesque and fantastic tales, the cyclic poems were an important source for later writers of epic. Yet...

Punishing Criminals is about sentencing theory and policy and the attempt to identify punishments other than imprisonment. Davies argues for the need to develop more credible and effective community-based intermediate sanctions that have the confidence of the public and the officials in the criminal system. He shows how focus groups can be used to improve the process of consultation. He sees the need to locate sentencing policy decisions within the wider context of the criminal justice process and presents empirical evidence from ten years study of the California criminal justice system....

It may seem odd to devote an entire book, however short, to a lost epic of which hardly any fragments (as normally defined) survive. The existence of a late prose summary of the epic's contents hardly dispels that oddness. One (rather long) word may supply justification: Neoanalysis.

This once influential theory held that motifs and episodes in the Iliad derive from the Aethiopis, called thus after an Ethiopian prince who allied with Troy against the Greeks, only to be killed by the Greeks' greatest hero, Achilles. The death of that hero himself, at the hands of Paris,...