 He also describes a meeting between himself and the Muses on Mount Helicon, where he had been pasturing sheep when the goddesses presented him with a laurel staff, a symbol of poetic authority ("Theogony" 22–35).Fanciful though the story might seem, the account has led ancient and modern scholars to infer that he was not a professionally trained rhapsode, or he would have been presented with a lyre instead.Some scholars have seen Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing that Hesiod develops in "Works and Days", but there are also arguments against that theory.