207 RECENZE / BOOK REVIEWS The presented collection of studies offers yet another view of Livy’s treatment of Roman his- tory. Although there is certainly a rich selec- tion at hand in the field of Liviana, it can be stated that the contributions of the reviewed title bring in some interesting and, to a certain degree, innovative insights: The authors inter- pret Livy’s work from the socio-cultural point of view, and, in several cases, examine the possible projection of the “Augustan perspective” onto Livy’s account of the earliest Roman history and institutions. 1 The collection consists of ten articles written in English or Italian, together with a general in- troduction in English that summarizes the con- tent of the articles and presents what the au- thors mean by what they call “cultural reading”. The complementary material of the book is formed by a general index locorum from ancient sources and a general bibliography. Moreover, the articles of A. Mastrocinque and A. A. Kluc- zek are supplemented with several pages of col- oured pictures, mostly of coins. The collection is presented as “the aftermath of a symposium” that took place at the Institute of History of the University of Zielona Góra, Poland, in May 2017 (p. 7). Individual articles do not lack authors’ affiliation; however, some brief additional information on them would be appreciated. The first article, Book Burning in Livy: Text and Context, by Daniel Sarefield, analyses Livy’s references to the cases, when writings that had been recognized by the authorities as danger- 1 “The shadow of the creator of the principate penetrates the majority of the articles.” (p. 8). Gillmeister, Andrzej (Ed.). (2018). Rerum Gestarum Monumentis et Memoriae: Cultural Read- ings in Livy. (208 p.). Warszawa: Uniwersytet warszawski. ISBN 978-83-943652-8-8. Markéta Melounová ous for the Roman state were publicly burnt. The article provides a well-articulated intro- duction and conclusions. The author “seeks to examine the evidence for the practice of book burning and state censorship in the work of the historian Titus Livius” (p. 13). First, he lists the cases of burning of the harmful political and religious writings during the Middle Republic present in Livy’s work. Afterwards, he strives to compare these situations to the period of Livy’s own lifetime and that immediately before (Late Republic, Augustan Principate). Unfortunately, here we find only general examples (burning of some kind of books) less relevant to the exam- ined issue or the comparison of the two peri- ods, such as debt records (p. 26), incriminating political testimonies (p. 21, n. 23, p. 25) or even poetry (pp. 22–23). The burning of infamatory writings or certain shady prophecies in Augus- tus’ time (pp. 29–31) is a much better parallel to the earlier Republican custom of destroying potentially dangerous writings described by Livy. Sarefield’s assumption that “Livy’s presen- tation of the early practice of book burning by the Roman state appears to be influenced by his experience with this practice in his own con- temporary world” (p. 13) can hardly be proven given the extant evidence, of which Sarefield is well aware (p. 32). In the second article, Livy and the Kingdom of Servius Tullius: Notes on the Foundation of the Aven- tine Cult of Diana (Liv. 1, 45), Beatrice Poletti pre- sents a detailed examination of the “aetiological” story illuminating the specifics of Diana’s cult on the Aventine Hill (the sacrifice of the prodigious Sabine heifer by a cunning Roman). Poletti sets the story into the appropriate context, i.e. the Graeco-Latina Brunensia 24 / 2019 / 1 https://doi.org/10.5817/GLB2019-1-14