healthy spirit of competitiveness, which makes men work. For brother Perses has been behaving badly,
demanding more than his share of the inheritance and bribing the local 'kings' to adjudge it to him. Instead
of that sort of wickedness, he should work:
Work, Perses, my fine gentleman, that Hunger may keep clear,
But fair Demeter love you well and fill your barn with cheer.(299-300)
The poem opens with moral remonstrances, hammered home in every way that Hesiod can think of; it
turns into a more or less systematic account of the farmer's year, as far as agriculture and vines go, with
miscellaneous precepts and a long excursus on sailing. 'If you are taken by desire for uncomfortable
seafaring', says the poet characteristically, '... I will tell you the ways of the sea',
Not as a seasoned mariner: I've never been on ship,
Except indeed from Aulis to Euboea's nearest tip(649-50)
-a distance of perhaps 100 yards. Thoughts of morality, of right and wrong ways of getting a livelihood,
and of the land of which Perses has robbed the poet, gradually crystallize into an account of the farmer's
year; which was not what we expected at the beginning.
Perses, the bad brother, appears initially to have cheated Hesiod and to be living on the fat of the land:
'Let us settle the case afresh, with an upright decision' (35). But later on it appears that he is impoverished
and scrounging on Hesiod. Strip to sow and strip to plough, says the poet, lest you be forced to go a-
begging, 'as now you come to me: but I will give you nothing more' (396). The discrepancy has led some
to think that Perses is a fiction, a mere peg to hang the poem on. It is indeed quite regular for works of
moral instruction to have a narrative framework. The Book of Ecclesiastes is put into the mouth of a
disillusioned old king of Israel; and in other Near Eastern literatures we find a Sumerian work in the form
of a father's remonstrance with his prodigal son, Egyptian wisdom texts spoken by viziers or unfairly
disgraced priests, and so on. The narrative is evidently meant to catch the reader's attention for the
instructions.
But it is not easy to imagine that Hesiod could have travelled the countryside singing a song which
accused the local magnates at Ascra of 'devouring bribes' and incurring the vengeance of heaven on the
whole community, if everybody knew the case was a fiction. The details about the father, too, seem to be
truthful: it is hard to see why Hesiod should have invented that sort of background for himself. So the
explanation is probably twofold: the song went on forming and enlarging itself in his mind, so that the
situation of Hesiod and his brother could develop and change; and also the changing focus and emphasis
of the poem led the poet to make his brother, at moments, fit in with the things he wanted to say.