Antisagoge
Pairing a promise with a threat, or a reward with a penalty, in balanced form.
Antisagoge sets two consequences side by side: do this and receive that; fail and suffer this other thing. The balance is structural, and the figure works because the two halves mirror each other in shape as well as in sense.
It is the natural rhetoric of law, contract, oath, and sermon — any discourse that must state both sides of a condition. Renaissance handbooks list it among the figures of argument rather than of ornament.
The persuasive force comes from completeness. A promise alone invites the listener to imagine a costless refusal; the paired penalty closes that exit without needing to be argued.
Common mistake: unbalancing the pair, so the reward is vague and the penalty specific (or the reverse). Readers register the asymmetry as manipulation even when they cannot name it.
“Keep faith with the city, and the city keeps faith with you; break it, and you will find no shelter in these walls.”
Keep reading the glossary
A grammatical balance of two opposed ideas — 'to be or not to be'.
Balancing a statement by adding the qualifying other side — 'not only... but also'.
A rhetorical scheme in which successive clauses have the same length and grammatical structure.
An ABBA word-order reversal — 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'.