ANTĔFIXA, terra-cottas, which exhibited various ornamental designs, and were used in architecture to cover the frieze (zophorus) of the entablature. These terra-cottas do not appear to have been used among the Greeks, but were probably Etruscan in their origin, and were thence taken for the decoration of Roman buildings. The name antefixa is evidently derived from the circumstance that they were fixed before the buildings which they adorned. Cato, the censor, complained that the Romans of his time began to despise ornaments of this description, and to prefer the marble friezes of Athens and Corinth. The rising taste which Cato deplored may account for the superior beauty of the antefixa preserved in the British Museum, which were discovered at Rome.
ANTENNA. [[Navis].]
ANTĔPĪLĀNI. [[Exercitus].]
ANTĔSIGNĀNI. [[Exercitus].]
ANTHESPHŎRĬA (ἀνθεσφόρια), a flower-festival, principally celebrated in Sicily, in honour of Demeter and Persephone, in commemoration of the return of Persephone to her mother in the beginning of spring.
ANTHESTĒRĬA. [[Dionysia].]
ANTĬDŎSIS (ἀντίδοσις), in its literal and general meaning, “an exchange,” was, in the language of the Attic courts, peculiarly applied to proceedings under a law which is said to have originated with Solon. By this, a citizen nominated to perform a leiturgia, such as a trierarchy or choregia, or to rank among the property-tax payers, in a class disproportioned to his means, was empowered to call upon any qualified person not so charged to take the office in his stead, or submit to a complete exchange of property, the charge in question of course attaching to the first party, if the exchange were finally effected. For the proceedings the courts were opened at a stated time every year by the magistrates that had official cognisance of the particular subject; such as the strategi in cases of trierarchy and rating to the property-taxes, and the archon in those of choregia.
ANTĬGRĂPHE (ἀντιγραφή) originally signified the writing put in by the defendant, his “plea” in all causes whether public or private, in answer to the indictment or bill of the prosecutor. It is, however, also applied to the bill or indictment of the plaintiff or accuser.
ĀNTLĬA (ἄντλια), any machine for raising water, a pump. The most important of these machines were:—(1) The tympanum; a tread-wheel, worked by men treading on it.—(2) A wheel having wooden boxes or buckets, so arranged as to form steps for those who trod the wheel.—(3) The chain pump.—(4) The cochlea, or Archimedes’s screw.—(5) The ctesibica machina, or forcing-pump.—Criminals were condemned to the antlia or tread-mill. The antlia with which Martial (ix. 19) watered his garden, was probably the pole and bucket universally employed in Italy, Greece, and Egypt. The pole is curved, as shown in the annexed figure; because it is the stem of a fir or some other tapering tree.
