Athens was Alexander Fuks' first love, and it is a matter of regret that he never carried out a plan to translate what he affectionately described as his ‘Hebrew Zimmern’. I offer here in his memory a short note to show how much in the dark we can still be about the most central issues.

It has been generally assumed that the robe (peplos) offered to Athena at the Great Panathenaea was placed on the olive–wood statue of immemorial antiquity, which was certainly small and portable. The view recently expressed by H. W. Parke, that by the late fifth century the peplos was of colossal size and offered to Pheidias' chryselephantine statue of Athena, dedicated in 438 BC, has been treated as heresy by at least one reviewer, G. T. W. Hooker.

The matter seems to me to be more open than that.

Parke is clearly relying on fragment 30 (Kock = Edmonds = Kassel and Austin) of the Macedonians of the Athenian comic poet Strattis; the date is uncertain, but cannot be far from 400 BC. The translation must be something like ‘This robe with ropes and windlasses countless men haul up like a sail on its mast.’ Hooker comments ‘We do not know the context, nor whether there is any element of comic exaggeration here; but the speaker is not saying that the peplos was as big as a sail, only that it was hauled up in the same way.’ But the countless men are outside the comparison, and, whatever the exaggeration, it seems hard to think that many men would be required for a small peplos.