DIPOLIE (Διπύλια). - A festival of the Athenian calendar that fell on the 13th day of the month Scirophorion (= June 29). It was dedicated to Zeus Polieus, protector of the city, whence the name, and was also called βουφένια because the sacrifice consisted in the ritual killing of an ox, a rite attested by Porphyry, De abst., 11, 29, by Aelian, Var. Hist., VIII, 3, and by the scholiast on Aristophanes, Nubes, 984.
The ceremony took place in two stages. In the first, oxen were led up to the acropolis before the open altar of Zeus, on which was placed a cake of wheat and barley in which the spirit of the harvest was concentrated. The ox that first tasted it was killed with an axe by a priest, who then threw the axe away and took to flight. The axe was judged in the Prytaneum as guilty of sacrilege and thrown into the sea. In the second stage the ox was flayed, its hide stuffed with straw and yoked to the plough; the meat was distributed among those present.
This is an agrarian sacrifice, at the time of the harvest. The first-fruits offered to Zeus are sacred, and therefore the ox is punished with death; but the axe is also punished, for having killed an animal that had become sacred because it had ingested something sacred. This, representing the vegetation spirit of the harvest, has a fertilizing value expressed by the yoking to the plough of the stuffed ox, that is, risen again inasmuch as it has incorporated the vegetation spirit.
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Nicola Turchi