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Assuming that Cervantes' career is a preparation for a final epic, his Persiles, we argue that to write it he needed to find an adequate balance of qua- lities of his epic hero. The qualities he tried to mix were courage and wisdom or, as the popular topic goes, fortitudo et sapien tia or armas y letras. We analyze the different proportion oí fortitudo and sapientia in the protagonists of Don Quijote and the Persiles using René Girard's theories about mimetic violence. In that examination we find that Cervantes' don Quijote is, at least at one level, a parody of the excessive fortitudo of the epic hero, and that in thus caricatu- ring excessive courage Cervantes realized its grave danger: it can provoke an unstoppable spell of mimetic violence. This epiphany allowed Cervantes to find the perfect proportion oí fortitudo et sapientia in the prevalence of the lat- ter, and to write his Persiles in that spirit. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]