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296 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
Gregory the Great, for example, when exhorting his
congregation to recall the saints Nereus and Achilleus,
reputedly martyred under Trajan in the first century
A.D., regarded their lifetime as the ideal period and
contrasted it with his present time. 53 The Gregorian
passage, which was used by lElfric in his Passio S.
Mauricii, was adapted in Blickling Homily No. X 54 to
provide a contrast between the first and last ages of the
world. Against such a background who can say that this
simple contrast between past and present in Lak of
Stedfastnesse is specifically Boethian?
The "up-down" antithesis in Chaucer's phrase: "turned
vp so doun is all this world", lines 5-6, is relevantly
illustrated by F. N. Robinson in his reference to Boeceis»
the condicion of thynges turned up-so-doun, that a man,
that is a devyne beest be meryte of his resoun, thynketh that
hymself nys neyther fair ne noble but it be thurw possessioun
of ostelementz that ne han no soules.
But Boethius is not the only one to present the idea. As
E. R. Curtius has pointed out, 56 this is the "basic formal
principle" of Carmina Burana No.6 where the idea is
emphasised in ludicrous examples of men and animals
doing things contrary to nature and commonsense,
exactly as in our modern phrase to express disbelief:
"pigs might fly". Another mediaeval example is seen
among the poems attributed to Lydgate by Halliwell.P"
A leche to thryve where none is sore ne sike,
An instrument of musyk withouten a sown,
A scorpion to be both mylde and meke,
A cloyster man ever rennyng in the towne.
53 Homilia XXVIII in Evangelia § 3, P. L. 76, cols. 1212-13.
•• .lElfric's Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat (E.E.T.S., 0.5., 76, 82, 94, 114,
1881-19°0), II 166-8; The Blickling Homilies ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S., 0.5. 58,
63, 73, 1874-80), 115. On the adaptation see ]. E. Cross, 'Gregory, Blickling
Homily X and iElfric's Passio S. Mauricii on the world's youth and age',
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen LXVI (1965), 327-30.
•• There is a printer's error in Robinson's edition, op. cit., 862 col. 2. The
reference should be to Boece, ii pro 5, 127-8 .
• 6 Curtius, op, cit., 95 for the statement.
• 1 A selection from the minor poems of Dan John Lydgate, ed. ]. O. Halliwell
(1840), II 57.