DIPOLIE (Διππόλια). — A festival of the Athenian calendar that fell on the 13th day of the month of Skioroforione (= 29 June). It was dedicated to Zeus Polieus, the city’s protector, whence its name, and was also called βουρύνα because the sacrifice consisted in the ritual slaughter of an ox, a rite attested by Porphyry, De abst., 11, 20, by Aelian, Var. Hist., VIII, 3, and by the scholiast on Aristophanes, Nubes, 984.
The ceremony unfolded in two stages. In the first, oxen were led onto the Acropolis before the open-air precinct of Zeus, where a cake of wheat and barley had been laid, in which the spirit of the harvest was concentrated. The ox that first tasted it was struck down with an axe by a priest, who then tasted the cake and fled. The axe was then judged in the Piratone as guilty of sacrilege and condemned at sea. In the second stage, the ox was flayed, its hide stuffed with straw, and yoked to a plough; the meat was distributed among the assembled.
This was an agricultural sacrifice at the time of harvest. The first-fruits offered to Zeus are sacred, and thus the ox is punished with death; yet the axe that slew the animal is also punished, for it had slain a creature that had become sacred through ingesting a sacred object. The cake, representing the spirit of vegetative growth in the harvest, possesses a fertilizing power, expressed by the addition of the stuffed ox to the plough—i.e., its resurrection as it has incorporated the spirit of vegetation.