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.

Thirdly, there is the passage in the "Theogony" relating to Hesiod and
the Muses. It is surely an error to suppose that lines 22-35 all refer
to Hesiod: rather, the author of the "Theogony" tells the story of his
own inspiration by the same Muses who once taught Hesiod glorious song.
The lines 22-3 are therefore a very early piece of tradition about
Hesiod, and though the appearance of Muses must be treated as a graceful
fiction, we find that a writer, later than the "Works and Days" by
perhaps no more than three-quarters of a century, believed in the
actuality of Hesiod and in his life as a farmer or shepherd.

Lastly, there is the famous story of the contest in song at Chalcis. In
later times the modest version in the "Works and Days" was elaborated,
first by making Homer the opponent whom Hesiod conquered, while a later
period exercised its ingenuity in working up the story of the contest
into the elaborate form in which it still survives. Finally the contest,
in which the two poets contended with hymns to Apollo [1104],
was transferred to Delos. These developments certainly need no
consideration: are we to say the same of the passage in the "Works and
Days"? Critics from Plutarch downwards have almost unanimously rejected
the lines 654-662, on the ground that Hesiod's Amphidamas is the hero
of the Lelantine Wars between Chalcis and Eretria, whose death may be
placed circa 705 B.C.--a date which is obviously too low for the
genuine Hesiod. Nevertheless, there is much to be said in defence of
the passage. Hesiod's claim in the "Works and Days" is modest, since
he neither pretends to have met Homer,