Quora Answer: What is the Rhetorical Device in, “Oceans Rise, Empires Fall”

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is the rhetorical device in, ‘Oceans rise, Empires fall’?”

This is an antithesis, and a bicolon.  An antithesis is a rhetorical device where the first portion of the phrase is the opposite of the second.  In this case, the elements are “ocean” versus “empire”, and the second is “rise” versus “fall”.

A bicolon is a form of isocolon, since it is an example of parallelism in speech where the number of syllables and words are identical.  Since there are only two phrases, this makes it a bicolon.