Again, Hesiod’s story of his relations with his brother Perses have been treated with scepticism (see Murray, “Anc. Gk. Literature”, pp. 53-54): Perses, it is urged, is clearly a mere dummy, set up to be the target for the poet’s exhortations. On such a matter precise evidence is naturally not forthcoming; but all probability is against the sceptical view. For 1) if the quarrel between the brothers were a fiction, we should expect it to be detailed at length and not noticed allusively and rather obscurely–as we find it; 2) as MM. Croiset remark, if the poet needed a lay-figure the ordinary practice was to introduce some mythological person–as, in fact, is done in the “Precepts of Chiron”. In a word, there is no more solid ground for treating Perses and his quarrel with Hesiod as fictitious than there would be for treating Cyrnus, the friend of Theognis, as mythical.
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