Dedication: Judith R. Ginsburg

Judy Ginsburg was to have been one of the original co-editors for this special volume on Tacitus, but her untimely death at home on December 28, 2002 meant that she was unable to see the project through to completion. Yet Judy's passion for Tacitus, the author that she made her own and opened up for other people, shone through in the engaging conversations that we had about the overall shape of this volume even when she was in the grip of a devastating and painful last illness. It was a pleasure and a privilege to participate in that dialogue with her. Judy herself did not live to see the end result, but as one of our contributors put it, she has certainly left her footprints on these pages. We hope that she would have enjoyed this work, which we fondly dedicate to her memory.

Judy's contribution to Tacitean studies began with the publication of her Ph.D. thesis, Tradition and Theme in the Annals of Tacitus (Berkeley 1981). In this seminal study, she examines Tacitus's elaborate manipulation of the traditional annalistic format in Annals 1–6, so differently crafted from what survives of the final hexad. Her insightful work offers an exemplary combination of depth and breadth, analysing how Tacitus represents successive years (and parts of years) intratextually and comparing this technique intertextually with Livy's arrangement of his narrative. Judy's fundamental argument that thematic considerations often led Tacitus to allow considerable temporal dislocations of his historical material must have felt unsettling for scholars at the time. Yet the subsequent discovery of the senatorial decree concerning Piso's trial endorsed (more than anyone at the time could have expected) Judy's central thesis about Tacitus's willingness to depart from strict chronological sequence to communicate his own vision of events.

It is impossible to imagine (even now) teaching a course on Roman historiography or analysing Tacitus's narrative technique for a scholarly article without consulting this book. One of its early reviewers, Miriam Griffin, concluded: "There will inevitably be differences of opinion when detailed analysis of Tacitus' narrative structure is concerned, for he operated with great subtlety. The value of Ginsburg's book lies in the persuasiveness of its principal conclusions and the stimulus it gives to systematic consideration of his basic structural unit" (JRS 72 [1982] 216). Judy's book certainly did stimulate the community of classical scholars and students in significant and long-lasting ways. Before 1981, Tacitean studies were strongly historical in their emphasis, but Judy set the agenda for a different mode of engagement with these subtle and difficult texts. She effectively opened up Roman historiography as a legitimate and valuable field of research in its own right for a whole new generation of scholars. Of course, she herself continued to participate actively in these developments, whether by working with her graduate students or by talking at conferences. Several of Judy's subsequent articles are case studies exploring how narratives of the republican past have an impact on constructions of the imperial present. One example is her stimulating piece ("In Maiores Certamina: Past and Present in the Annals," in Luce and Woodman 1993.86–103) on how Tacitus, in his own narrative, echoes two great republican debates as represented by Sallust and Livy to underscore senatorial decline.

One of the chapters in Judy's first book elegantly begins with a memorable quote from Lewis Carroll: "The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. 'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'" It seems strangely poignant that, over twenty years after the publication of her first book, Judy, rather like her White Rabbit, continued thinking, working, and writing right up until she herself came to the end. Her final publication, Representing Agrippina: Constructions of Female Power in the Early Roman Empire, was published in 2006. This study examines one of the most vivid female figures from the Annals: Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero (who was memorably born feet-first...