ANTILIA or Antillia, sometimes called the Island of the Seven Cities (Portuguese Isla das Sete Cidades), a legendary island in the Atlantic ocean. The origin of the name is quite uncertain. The oldest suggested etymology (1455) fancifully connects it with the name of the Platonic Atlantis, while later writers have endeavoured to derive it from the Latin anterior (i.e. the island that is reached “before” Cipango), or from the Jezirat al Tennyn, “Dragon’s Isle,” of the Arabian geographers. Antilia is marked in an anonymous map which is dated 1424 and preserved in the grand-ducal library at Weimar. It reappears in the maps of the Genoese B. Beccario or Beccaria (1435), and of the Venetian Andrea Bianco (1436), and again in 1455 and 1476. In most of these it is accompanied by the smaller and equally legendary islands of Royllo, St Atanagio, and Tanmar, the whole group being classified as insulae de novo repertae, “newly discovered islands.” The Florentine Paul Toscanelli, in his letters to Columbus and the Portuguese court (1474), takes Antilia as the principal landmark for measuring the distance between Lisbon and the island of Cipango or Zipangu (Japan). One of the chief early descriptions of Antilia is that inscribed on the globe which the geographer Martin Behaim made at Nuremberg in 1492 (see [Map]: History). Behaim relates that in 734—a date which is probably a misprint for 714—and after the Moors had conquered Spain and Portugal, the island of Antilia or “Septe Cidade” was colonized by Christian refugees under the archbishop of Oporto and six bishops. The inscription adds that a Spanish vessel sighted the island in 1414. According to an old Portuguese tradition each of the seven leaders founded and ruled a city, and the whole island became a Utopian commonwealth, free from the disorders of less favoured states. Later Portuguese tradition localized Antilia in the island of St Michael’s, the largest of the Azores. It is impossible to estimate how far this legend commemorates some actual but imperfectly recorded discovery, and how far it is a reminiscence of the ancient idea of an elysium in the western seas which is embodied in the legends of the Isles of the Blest or Fortunate Islands.
ANTILLES, a term of somewhat doubtful origin, now generally used, especially by foreign writers, as synonymous with the expression “West India Islands.” Like “Brazil,” it dates from a period anterior to the discovery of the New World, “Antilia,” as stated above, being one of those mysterious lands, which figured on the medieval charts sometimes as an archipelago, sometimes as continuous land of greater or lesser extent, constantly fluctuating in mid-ocean between the Canaries and East India. But it came at last to be identified with the land discovered by Columbus. Later, when this was found to consist of a vast archipelago enclosing the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, Antilia assumed its present plural form, Antilles, which was collectively applied to the whole of this archipelago.
A distinction is made between the Greater Antilles, including Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and Porto Riro; and the Lesser Antilles, covering the remainder of the islands.
ANTILOCHUS, in Greek legend, son of Nestor, king of Pylos. One of the suitors of Helen, he accompanied his father to the Trojan War. He was distinguished for his beauty, swiftness of foot, and skill as a charioteer; though the youngest among the Greek princes, he commanded the Pylians in the war, and performed many deeds of valour. He was a favourite of the gods, and an intimate friend of Achilles, to whom he was commissioned to announce the death of Patroclus. When his father was attacked by Memnon, he saved his life at the sacrifice of his own (Pindar, Pyth. vi. 28), thus fulfilling an oracle which had bidden him “beware of an Ethiopian.” His death was avenged by Achilles. According to other accounts, he was slain by Hector (Hyginus, Fab. 113), or by Paris in the temple of the Thymbraean Apollo together with Achilles (Dares Phrygius 34). His ashes, with those of Achilles and Patroclus, were deposited in a mound on the promontory of Sigeum, where the inhabitants of Ilium offered sacrifice to the dead heroes (Odyssey, xxiv. 72; Strabo xiii. p. 596). In the Odyssey (xi. 468) the three friends are represented as united in the underworld and walking together in the fields of asphodel; according to Pausanias (iii. 19) they dwell together in the island of Leuke.
ANTIMACASSAR, a separate covering for the back of a chair, or the head or cushions of a sofa, to prevent soiling of the permanent fabric. The name is attributable to the unguent for the hair commonly used in the early 19th century,—Byron calls it “thine incomparable oil, Macassar.” The original antimacassar was almost invariably made of white crochet-work, very stiff, hard, and uncomfortable, but in the third quarter of the 19th century it became simpler and less inartistic, and was made of soft coloured stuffs, usually worked with a simple pattern in tinted wools or silk.
ANTIMACHUS, of Colophon or Claros, Greek poet and grammarian, flourished about 400 B.C. Scarcely anything is known of his life. His poetical efforts were not generally appreciated, although he received encouragement from his younger contemporary Plato (Plutarch, Lysander, 18). His chief works were: a long-winded epic Thebais, an account of the expedition of the Seven against Thebes and the war of the Epigoni; and an elegiac poem Lyde, so called from the poet’s mistress, for whose death he endeavoured to find consolation by ransacking mythology for stories of unhappy love affairs (Plutarch, Consol. ad Apoll. 9; Athenaeus xiii. 597). Antimachus was the founder of “learned” epic poetry, and the forerunner of the Alexandrian school, whose critics allotted him the next place to Homer. He also prepared a critical recension of the Homeric poems.