Akroterion

About Akroterion

Akroterion — Journal Profile

Akroterion is a peer-reviewed journal of classical studies published in South Africa by the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University. It welcomes scholarly contributions on all aspects of Greek and Roman civilisation, including the influence and reception of the classics, and it has a deliberately broad readership in mind: its own focus and scope statement says that preference is given to articles that present specialised research in a way that remains accessible to all scholars of Classical and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and the journal has long aimed at readers who value the ancient world without necessarily working as narrow specialists in a single subfield. The Journals World record for this post carries the journal under the single-word title Akroterion, with print ISSN 0303-1896 and electronic ISSN 2079-2883, a pairing that is confirmed by the journal's listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which records exactly those two numbers, in exactly that order of print and electronic. The journal is published once a year, it provides immediate open access to its contents, and its articles carry DOIs. For classicists in southern Africa it is one of the longest-running homes for research on Greek and Roman antiquity, and for readers elsewhere it is a useful window onto how classical scholarship is practised, taught and received on the African continent.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Akroterion
• Publisher: Department of Ancient Studies, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (publisher name as recorded in DOAJ)
• Print ISSN: 0303-1896
• Electronic ISSN: 2079-2883
• Frequency: Once a year, per the journal's own About page
• Open access: Immediate open access; content freely available without charge, in accordance with the BOAI definition as stated by the journal
• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND), per DOAJ and the journal's article pages
• Peer review: Initial editor screening followed by anonymised refereeing by at least two anonymous referees, per the journal; DOAJ describes the process as double anonymous peer review
• Languages: English and Afrikaans, per DOAJ language data
• Subjects (DOAJ keywords): Classical studies, Greek antiquity, Roman antiquity
• Article processing charge: DOAJ records an APC with a maximum of 1,000 ZAR — authors should confirm the current charge on the journal's own submissions page before submitting
• Publication time: DOAJ records a publication time of 8 weeks — treat this as a directory figure and confirm current timelines with the editor
• Editorial contact (journal site): Akroterion, Department of Ancient Studies, University of Stellenbosch, Private Bag X1, Matieland, 7602, South Africa
• Official website: akroterion.journals.ac.za, on the SUNJournals portal

History and Development

The journal's own sixtieth-anniversary editorial, written by its editor J. C. Thom, tells the founding story in the journal's own words. Akroterion began, in that account, as a humble newsletter published in support of Latin school teachers, and it developed over the decades into a widely recognised scholarly journal, accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training and indexed in international databases such as L'Année philologique. The same editorial, published in the journal's 2015 volume as it marked sixty years of classical scholarship and service to the academic community, makes clear how much the setting has changed around the journal. When Akroterion started, Latin and even Greek were still taught in many South African high schools, Latin was compulsory for all law students, and many church denominations required several years of Greek and Latin before ordination. Most of that school and university landscape has since disappeared, and with it the ready-made audience of Latin teachers the original newsletter served.

The journal adapted rather than folded. University courses in Classical Civilisation and Ancient Cultures, which do not require knowledge of Greek or Latin, came to account for the majority of student enrolments relating to the ancient world in South Africa, and Akroterion's focus expanded in step: toward articles for readers without knowledge of the ancient languages, and especially toward work demonstrating the enduring relevance of the classical heritage in South Africa and the broader continent. Submissions, which once came predominantly from staff members of the University of Stellenbosch, now arrive, in the editor's words, from a wide spectrum of scholars both nationally and internationally. That trajectory — from a teachers' newsletter rooted in one department to an accredited, internationally contributed annual journal — is the essential history of the title, and it explains the journal's present character: scholarly in standard, generalist in address, and conscious of a South African setting in which the classics must continually make their case to new readers.

The DOAJ listing adds two directory data points that sit alongside that narrative. It records the journal's open-access start year as 1990, which reflects the reach of its digitised back content rather than the founding of the print title, and it shows the journal entering the directory in 2020. Readers using the archive should therefore distinguish three different dates that are easily confused: the mid-twentieth-century origins described in the anniversary editorial, the long print run that followed, and the modern online presence on the SUNJournals platform, through which current volumes and a deep back archive are now read worldwide without charge.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Akroterion's stated scope is all aspects of Greek and Roman civilisation, including its influence and reception. In practice that covers Greek and Latin language and literature, ancient history, classical philosophy and thought, ancient art and archaeology, and the afterlife of classical material in later periods — the reception studies, translations and teaching-oriented pieces the journal explicitly welcomes. The journal publishes the winning essay of the annual essay competition held under the auspices of the Classical Association of South Africa, and it occasionally publishes translations of previously unpublished Greek and Latin texts and research articles of a didactic nature. Those last two features are unusual among classics journals and worth noting: a translation of a previously unpublished ancient text is a primary-source contribution, not a secondary commentary, and a didactic article speaks to the journal's continuing interest in how the classics are taught, an interest that descends directly from its newsletter origins in support of school teachers.

DOAJ classifies the journal under the Library of Congress headings for the history of the Greco-Roman world and for Greek and Latin language and literature, with keywords of classical studies, Greek antiquity and Roman antiquity. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSNs to source S2736662123 at the time of checking, associates it with topics including classical antiquity studies, classical studies and philology, classical philosophy and thought, ancient Mediterranean archaeology and history, and Renaissance literature and culture. The fit between those two independent descriptions is close: this is a general classics journal, not a journal of one period, one language or one method, and authors working anywhere from Homeric poetry to the modern reception of Roman law in South Africa can plausibly find a home in it, provided the work is written so that a well-informed reader outside the immediate specialism can follow and profit from it.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

The journal describes its review process plainly. All research articles submitted to Akroterion undergo rigorous peer review, which involves initial editor screening and anonymised refereeing by at least two anonymous referees. Reviewers are asked to complete a brief written report together with a score sheet on whether the article is suitable for publication. No editorial consideration is given to manuscripts that have been published previously or that are under consideration elsewhere, and, to preserve the advantages of anonymous review, authors are asked to avoid identifying themselves in the manuscript. DOAJ summarises the same arrangement as double anonymous peer review and links to the journal's editorial policies and editorial team pages for the detail.

For authors, the practical implications are straightforward. Prepare the manuscript as an anonymised document, with identifying information kept out of the text and file properties as far as the submission system allows; do not send work that is simultaneously before another journal; and expect a process built around written referee reports rather than a purely editorial decision. The journal's frequency shapes expectations too. An annual journal cannot offer the rolling publication rhythm of a quarterly, and DOAJ's recorded publication time of eight weeks should be read as a directory statistic about part of the process, not as a promise that an accepted article will appear within two months of submission. Authors working to a fixed deadline — for a promotion round, a funding report or a degree — should write to the editor early and ask how the current volume is filling, rather than relying on any single published figure.

Metrics and Standing — Read Them by Source

Akroterion is a small, specialised humanities annual, and its citation figures must be read in that light: classics is a slow-citing field, a single yearly volume produces few citable items, and different databases count very different corpora. Three attributed snapshots illustrate the spread. OpenAlex, at the time of checking, recorded 540 works and 768 citations for the source resolved from the journal's ISSNs, with summary statistics of an h-index of 13 and an i10-index of 19; those figures reach back across the journal's long digitised archive. SCImago-based summaries tell a different, narrower story, because SCImago works from Scopus coverage: a Resurchify summary of SCImago data, last updated in June 2025, recorded a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.101, an h-index of 2, a best quartile of Q4 in the Classics category, and Scopus coverage listed as 2019 and 2021–2023. The Journals World source data behind the earlier thin version of this record likewise carried an h-index of 2. None of these numbers contradicts the others; they measure different databases over different windows. What they agree on is the journal's real position: a respected, accredited national journal in a small field, valued for its community role, its accessibility and its South African perspective, rather than a high-volume citation venue. Authors should judge it on fit, readership and accreditation — South African authors in particular should note its accreditation by the Department of Higher Education and Training, as stated in the journal's own editorial — and not on any single headline metric.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's own anniversary editorial names indexing in L'Année philologique, the standard international bibliography of classical studies, and accreditation by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training. Its DOAJ listing, verified directly through the DOAJ search API for both of its ISSNs at the time of researching this profile, confirms its open-access status and supplies the structured data quoted in the Quick Facts above: the licence, the review model, the article charge ceiling and the languages. Its presence in Scopus-derived data is what places it in SCImago, with the Q4 Classics placement described above. Articles carry DOIs under the journal's own numbering pattern — article pages show DOIs in the form 10.7445 followed by the volume and article numbers — which supports stable citation and linking. A full, current indexing list is best confirmed on the journal's own website and in the ISSN Portal record for 0303-1896 and 2079-2883, because database coverage of small annuals changes more often than journal websites are updated. Any indexing claim for this journal that cannot be traced to one of those sources should be treated as could not be verified, and this profile makes no such untraced claims.

Open Access, Fees and Subscriptions

Akroterion provides immediate open access to its content on the principle, stated on its own site, that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. All content is freely available without charge to the user or the user's institution, and readers may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access. Authors retain copyright, per DOAJ, and grant the journal the right of first publication, with the work licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 as its article pages state. The journal also grants Stellenbosch researchers permission to deposit their published articles in repositories, provided the link to the original publication and the DOI are included, the publisher is acknowledged, and the published version is used with its layout and branding intact.

On charges, precision matters. DOAJ records that the journal has an article processing charge, with a maximum of 1,000 ZAR, and no other charges. That is a directory record, and the amount may have changed since it was captured; the journal's own submissions and author-guidelines pages are the authoritative place to confirm what, if anything, is payable for the current volume. Print has not disappeared either: the journal's About page lists subscription prices of R120 for South African subscriptions and US$15, UK£11 or €12 for foreign subscriptions, postage included, with banking details on the journal homepage. Those figures, too, should be confirmed directly with the department before payment, as prices printed on long-standing journal pages are a classic source of out-of-date information.

How to Submit

Submissions are handled through the journal's site on the SUNJournals portal at akroterion.journals.ac.za, where the submissions and author-guidelines pages set out the current requirements. Before submitting, an author should read those guidelines in full, confirm the current article charge and volume schedule, prepare an anonymised manuscript that does not identify its author, and make sure the work is not under consideration anywhere else. Contributions and subscriptions are administered by Akroterion in the Department of Ancient Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, Private Bag X1, Matieland, 7602, South Africa, and the About page prints a departmental telephone number and an editorial email address for correspondence. Writing the article for the journal's stated preference — specialised research presented accessibly — is the single most useful thing an author can do before submission: open with the problem in terms a neighbouring classicist can grasp, keep untranslated Greek and Latin to what the argument genuinely needs, and explain South African or reception material, where relevant, for the international readers the journal now attracts.

Similar Journals Worth Comparing

Authors considering Akroterion often also consider Acta Classica, the journal of the Classical Association of South Africa, which shares the South African classical community but has its own history and rhythm; Scholia, another South African classics title with a strong interest in accessible scholarship; and, further afield, long-established general classics journals such as Greece and Rome and The Classical Review, which differ in publisher, frequency and audience. None of these is a substitute for Akroterion: the comparison that matters is of scope, readership and accreditation for the author's own institution, and on those measures Akroterion's combination of South African accreditation, open access and a generalist classics brief is distinctive. Readers new to the journal will get the best sense of it by reading a recent volume in full — it is free to do so — and noting the balance the editors strike between philology, history, philosophy, archaeology and reception.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Akroterion's ISSNs? Print ISSN 0303-1896 and electronic ISSN 2079-2883, as recorded on this Journals World record and confirmed in the journal's DOAJ listing.

Who publishes Akroterion? The Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, as recorded in DOAJ and on the journal's own site.

Is Akroterion open access? Yes. The journal provides immediate open access to all content without charge, under a CC BY-NC-ND licence, with authors retaining copyright.

Is Akroterion listed in DOAJ? Yes — this was verified through the DOAJ search API for both ISSNs during the research for this profile. DOAJ records double anonymous peer review, languages English and Afrikaans, and an article charge with a maximum of 1,000 ZAR.

How often does Akroterion appear? Once a year, per the journal's own About page.

What does Akroterion publish? Scholarly work on all aspects of Greek and Roman civilisation, including influence and reception, plus the winning essay of the Classical Association of South Africa's annual essay competition, occasional translations of previously unpublished Greek and Latin texts, and didactic research articles.

How is Akroterion reviewed? By initial editor screening followed by anonymised refereeing by at least two anonymous referees, who submit written reports and a score sheet, per the journal.

What are Akroterion's metrics? They depend on the database. OpenAlex recorded an h-index of 13 across its long archive at the time of checking, while SCImago-based summaries based on Scopus coverage recorded an SJR of 0.101, an h-index of 2 and Q4 in Classics. Read each figure with its source attached, as this profile does.

Verifying This Record

The identity of this record rests on the pairing of the title Akroterion with ISSNs 0303-1896 and 2079-2883. That pairing is consistent across the Journals World record, the DOAJ listing and the journal's own platform. The numeric publisher codes that appeared in the earlier thin version of this page were not a publisher name and should be disregarded; the publisher is the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University. Where a figure in this profile could not be traced to a source actually consulted — the journal's own pages, its DOAJ listing, OpenAlex or SCImago-derived summaries — it has been left out rather than filled in, and directory figures such as the article charge and publication time are flagged for confirmation with the journal before an author acts on them.