ANTISTHENES (c. 444-365 B.C.), the founder of the Cynic school of philosophy, was born at Athens of a Thracian mother, a fact which may account for the extreme boldness of his attack on conventional thought. In his youth he studied rhetoric under Gorgias, perhaps also under Hippias and Prodicus. Gomperz suggests that he was originally in good circumstances, but was reduced to poverty. However this may be, he came under the influence of Socrates, and became a devoted pupil. So eager was he to hear the words of Socrates that he used to walk daily from Peiraeus to Athens, and persuaded his friends to accompany him. Filled with enthusiasm for the Socratic idea of virtue, he founded a school of his own in the Cynosarges, the hall of the bastards (νόθοι). Thither he attracted the poorer classes by the simplicity of his life and teaching. He wore a cloak and carried a staff and a wallet, and this costume became the uniform of his followers. Diogenes Laertius says that his works filled ten volumes, but of these fragments only remain. His favourite style seems to have been the dialogue, wherein we see the effect of his early rhetorical training. Aristotle speaks of him as uneducated and simple-minded, and Plato describes him as struggling in vain with the difficulties of dialectic. His work represents one great aspect of Socratic philosophy, and should be compared with the Cyrenaic and Megarian doctrines.
Bibliography.—Charles Chappuis, Antisthène (Paris, 1854); A. Müller, De Antisthenis cynici vita et scriptis (Dresden, 1860); T. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (Eng. trans., 1905), vol. ii. pp. 142 ff., 150 ff. For his philosophy see [Cynics], and for his pupils, Diogenes and Crates, see articles under these headings.
ANTISTROPHE, the portion of an ode which is sung by the chorus in its returning movement from west to east, in response to the strophe, which was sung from east to west. It is of the nature of a reply, and balances the effect of the strophe. Thus, in Gray’s ode called “The Progress of Poesy,” the strophe, which dwelt in triumphant accents on the beauty, power and ecstasy of verse, is answered by the antistrophe, in a depressed and melancholy key—
| “Man’s feeble race what ills await, Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain, Disease and Sorrow’s weeping Train, And Death, sad refuge from the storms of Fate,” &c. |
When the sections of the chorus have ended their responses, they unite and close in the epode, thus exemplifying the triple form in which the ancient sacred hymns of Greece were composed, from the days of Stesichorus onwards. As Milton says, “strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music then used with the chorus that sang.”
ANTITHESIS (the Greek for “setting opposite”), in rhetoric, the bringing out of a contrast in the meaning by an obvious contrast in the expression, as in the following:—“When there is need of silence, you speak, and when there is need of speech, you are dumb; when present, you wish to be absent, and when absent, you desire to be present; in peace you are for war, and in war you long for peace; in council you descant on bravery, and in the battle you tremble.” Antithesis is sometimes double or alternate, as in the appeal of Augustus:—“Listen, young men, to an old man to whom old men were glad to listen when he was young.” The force of the antithesis is increased if the words on which the beat of the contrast falls are alliterative, or otherwise similar in sound, as—“The fairest but the falsest of her sex.” There is nothing that gives to expression greater point and vivacity than a judicious employment of this figure; but, on the other hand, there is nothing more tedious and trivial than a pseudo-antithetical style. Among English writers who have made the most abundant use of antithesis are Pope, Young, Johnson, and Gibbon; and especially Lyly in his Euphues. It is, however, a much more common feature in French than in English; while in German, with some striking exceptions, it is conspicuous by its absence.
ANTITYPE (Gr. ἀντίτυπος), the correlative of “type,” to which it corresponds as the stamp to the die, or vice versa. In the sense of copy or likeness the word occurs in the Greek New Testament (Heb. ix. 24; 1 Peter iii. 21), English “figure.” By theological writers antitype is employed to denote the reality of which a type is the prophetic symbol. Thus, Christ is the antitype of many of the types of the Jewish ritual. By the fathers of the Greek church (e.g. Gregory Nazianzen) antitype is employed as a designation of the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.