Open Access Journal: Circe de Clásicos y Modernos

 [First posted in AWOL 11 November 2009. Updated 22  October 2026]

Circe de Clásicos y Modernos
On-line ISSN 1851-1724 
ISSN-e: 1514-3333

Circe de Clásicos y Modernos is an annual publication by the Instituto de Estudios Clásicos of the Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, director Marta Alesso. The journal aims to publish original works on Philology, Philosophy, History, Literature and Classic Tradition, and for these to be accepted by members of the International Review Committee, who referee blind the works sent by the Editorial Committee. The journal’s geographical reach is international. It also publishes reviews of books by Argentinian and foreign authors and news on scientific events in the journal’s specialization.

Circe clás. mod. vol.30 no.1 Santa Rosa June 2026  Artículos       ·  Género doxográfico y diatriba antiestoica en el tratado pseudofilónico “Sobre la indestructibilidad del mundo (Aet.)” Alesso, Marta         · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )       ·  Epítome de la historia de Alejandro Magno. Introducción, traducción y notas Notes, Epitome of the Deeds of Alexander the Great. Introduction, Translation and         · abstract in English | Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )       ·  Representaciones de la composición poética en la comedia de Aristófanes Schere, Jimena         · abstract in English | Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )       ·  La reconfiguración elegíaco-epistolar de Safo en la Heroida 15 de Ovidio Reales, Nicolás Pedro Alberto         · abstract in English | Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )       ·  Palíngrafos virgilianos en Bomarzo de Manuel Mujica Lainez Constantino, Genaro Valencia         · abstract in English | Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )      Reseñas       ·  Unceta Gómez, Luis y Salcedo González, Cristina (eds.) Clasicismo e identidades contemporáneas. Recepciones clásicas en la cultura de masas. Madrid: Catarata, 2024, 302 págs. ISBN 978-84-1067-061-7 Laborde, por Jeremías         · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )

See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

Spanish/Catalan/Portuguese Open Access Journals on the Ancient World

“And in whom do you most delight?” Poets, Im/mortals, and the Homeric Hymns

“And in whom do you most delight?” Poets, Im/mortals, and the Homeric Hymns

Romano, Carman

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Greek and Latin

In the first portion of this project, I analyze the myths of the Homeric Hymns from a divine vantage point, exploring the ways in which their narrators ask the divine to “delight” in their work. Unsurprisingly, deities enjoy hearing of their own superiority, and I argue that the Hymns' mythic scenes of epiphany efficiently crystallize that superiority into narrative form. Because epiphany forces a direct confrontation between god and human, it provides an opportunity for the poet to juxtapose god with mortal, efficiently revealing their insurmountable differences. In particular, by way of the epiphanic scene, the poet, in order that his divine audience might “delight in him the most,” communicates to his titular divinity the total insufficiency of human beings to interact with the divine. I focus, however, on the context in which these epiphanic scenes are deployed, and I ask how that context might affect the entire mythic narrative's appeal, especially to mortal audiences. In the second piece of this project, I delve into the poems' appeal to mortal audiences, and examine how the Hymns' poets use dramatic irony, framing devices, and humor to “delight” the human beings listening to their compositions. I argue that the poets seek to flatter their mortal audiences by providing them with information deliberately withheld from mortal characters. Even further, the Hymns' narrators reveal to their mortal listeners information withheld from divine characters as well. The singer of one of the myths incorporated into Hymn to Apollo, for example, lets his audience know the trick about to be played on Apollo, thus allowing the usually terrifying god to be humiliated—much to the mortal audience's “delight.” I hone in especially on the Hymn to Hermes and argue that its poet subverts the type-casting deployed in the other Hymns' mythic scenes of epiphany at divine expense. I show how the narrator of the myth relayed in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, rather than leverage the type- (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sarah Iles Johnston (Advisor); Carolina López-Ruiz (Committee Member); Thomas Hawkins (Committee Member) 

 

De-Marginalizing Prophetic Suprahuman Knowledge

De-Marginalizing Prophetic Suprahuman Knowledge

Biggerstaff, Michael

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

This dissertation assesses biblical prophets' claims to possess access to suprahuman knowledge. A common modern scholarly construct of biblical prophecy holds that prophets were primarily social critics who denounced social injustice and exhorted repentance. The problem with that construct is not that it acknowledges prophets as decrying social ills and admonishing repentance, but that the construct marginalizes prophets' alleged suprahuman knowledge to the function of social criticism. A close analysis of the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible, as provided herein, reveals that the modern construct has inverted the primary focus of the ancient texts. Rather than present the prophets as primarily social critics who denounce social injustice and exhort repentance, the biblical authors principally emphasized the prophets as suprahuman knowledge specialists who occasionally decried social ills and preached repentance. The introductory chapter demonstrates the prevalence of the modern scholarly construct by citing numerous statements by scholars who explicitly marginalize biblical claims that prophets possessed access to suprahuman knowledge in favor of interpreting prophets as social critics denouncing social ills and exhorting repentance. Chapter two provides a history of scholarship from the Dead Sea Scrolls through the twentieth century that establishes the origin of the modern construct as a product of the nineteenth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, exegetes never understood prophetic claims of suprahuman knowledge as subordinate to issues of social justice and repentance. In chapter three, I expose how biblical prophetic texts only occasionally depicted the prophets as social critics. Even in cases where the prophets were portrayed as decrying social injustice or exhorting repentance, the authors paired those statements with claims of prophets announcing information beyond normal human ken. Whereas relatively few prophetic texts paint the prophets as...

Committee: Samuel Meier (Advisor); Daniel Frank (Committee Member); Michael Swartz (Committee Member) 

 

Le mausolée de Néapolis de Scythie

Le mausolée de Néapolis de Scythie

Publié le 22 octobre 2026 par Th. Castelli

Shul’c, P.N. (1953) : Мавзолей Неаполя Скифского / Mavzolej Neapolja Skifskogo, Moscou [Le mausolée de Néapolis de Scythie].

Ce mausolée construit sous forme de tour abrite 72 tombes des élites locales de la ville de Néapolis de Scythie, capitale du royaume scythe des IIe-Ier s. installés en Crimée. L’ouvrage publie le résultats des fouilles de cette tour fouillée depuis 1946.

Ouvrage richement illustré en noir et blanc, avec notamment 33 planches.

Le livre en ligne : https://neapolis-scythian.com/stati/

“Into the Earth or Into the Womb”: Medico-Mythic Gynecology

“Into the Earth or Into the Womb”: Medico-Mythic Gynecology

Amey, Miranda

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Greek and Latin

This project uses mythology as a heuristic tool to enrich our understanding of the ancient female body and its processes. Alongside the important and necessary implications afforded by Greco-Roman myth, each of my chapters works through the prominent tripartite biological statuses of the ancient woman that appear in the surviving Greco-Roman gynecological documents—post-natal care, pregnancy/birth, and virginity. By approaching the material from three separate angles, my dissertation explores the complex relationship between medicine and mythology. In each life stage of an ancient woman, I reveal how “irrational” myth and “rational” Greco-Roman medicine support one another in the reckoning, mechanisms, and actions of the female body. Each chapter utilizes Soranus' Gynecology to commence an analysis of each life stage because, as a document speculated to be a manual for midwifery, it offers a viable proving ground due to its range of topics from virginity to raising children.

Committee: Fritz Graf (Advisor); Julia Nelson Hawkins (Committee Member); Sarah Iles Johnston (Committee Member) 

 

 

The Birth of Sacrifice: Ritualized Deities in Eastern Mediterranean Mythology

The Birth of Sacrifice: Ritualized Deities in Eastern Mediterranean Mythology

Hütwohl, Dannu

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Greek and Latin

This dissertation explores myths from cultures of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean that depict gods performing sacrifice and gods as the victims of sacrifice. The author investigates how the motif of divine sacrifice or ritualized deities is connected to aitiologies of sacrifice and the typology of dying and rising gods. The author situates the myths within a historical framework of cultural exchange in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to show how different cultures in contact adapted and creatively reworked myths about gods involved in sacrifice. The author begins with a new reading of the Mesopotamian story of Atrahasis and shows through an analysis of Mesopotamian ritual texts that the slaughter of the god Ilawela in Atrahasis should be interpreted as the first sacrifice, which results in the creation of humans who then provide offerings to the gods. The author then uses the Hebrew Bible as a case study to show how the theme of sacrifice and anthropogeny was adapted by a neighboring culture. Then, with a close reading of Hesiod's myth of Prometheus and Pandora and the Greek story of the flood preserved by Pseudo-Apollodoros, the author argues that Greek authors borrowed the Mesopotamian motif of sacrifice and anthropogeny and adapted it to fit Greek theology. Next, in an investigation of the fragmentary Phoenician myth of Melqart, the author offers a new reading of the myth about the attempted sacrifice of Herakles recorded by Herodotos and argues that the historian preserves a Greek adaptation of the myth of the sacrifice of Melqart, who was syncretized with Herakles by the fifth-century BCE. The author then reads the Phoenician myth of the sacrifice of the infant god Ieoud, preserved by the Roman period author Philo of Byblos, as an adaptation of the pattern of a dying and rising god known from the Ugaritic myth of Baal, the historical antecedent of Melqart. Accordingly, the author shows how Philo's myth of Ieoud provides crucial information for reconst (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Carolina López-Ruiz (Advisor); Fritz Graf (Committee Member); Sam Meier (Committee Member) 

 

 

Bet Rhomaye: Being and Belonging in Syriac in the Late Roman Empire

Bet Rhomaye: Being and Belonging in Syriac in the Late Roman Empire  

Wolfe, James

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Greek and Latin

My dissertation investigates how Syriac-speakers conceptualized their communal subjectivities within a Roman imperial context. I argue that Syriac literature from the Roman empire, and especially Syriac historiography and Syriac liturgical texts, provided Syriac-speakers with the discursive tools with which they could interpret recent history and formulate conceptions of the self within a Roman context. I argue that Syriac identity prior to the formation of the Syriac Orthodox Church was articulated through a dialectic with contemporary Roman imaginaries of ethnicity and citizenship. In doing so, I problematize scholarship that supposes `Syriacness' and `Romanness' were antithetical in the late Roman period. Instead, I contend that Syriac-speaking communities adopted, manipulated, and redefined discourses of Romanness in order to create their own Syriac-speaking Roman subjectivities.

Committee: Anthony Kaldellis (Advisor); David Brakke (Committee Member); Fritz Graf (Committee Member)