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The term Bouphonia refers to a sacrifice performed by Athenians during the Dipolia or Dipoleia, the feast of Zeus Polieus celebrated on the Acropolis of Athens at the beginning of July. Lexically speaking, the name of the ritual associates a bovine (bous) and a killing progressively conceived as a 'murder' (phonos). The verb bouphonein is attested once in theIliad (VII, 466) without such a moral connotation being perceptible, any more than it is in the few uses of the adjective bouphonos in archaic and classical poetry. A Bouphoniōn month appears in the calendar of certain Ionian islands, implying the celebration of Bouphonies in these places at ancient but indeterminate periods. Furthermore, the month Boukatios and the festival of Boukatia are documented in Central Greece, and also refer to the killing (kainein) of a bovine. It's interesting to note that the bovine is the only sacrificial animal whose name enters into composition with the lexicon of killing, whereas other species are much more often involved in this type of ritual slaughter. It has to be said that the sacrifice of a bovine is prestigious, costly and even spectacular. But that's not the only reason for this lexical emphasis.
To explore this point further, we turn to the Athenian sacrifice to Zeus Polieus. Indeed, its remarkable features have made it an object of curiosity and interpretation since antiquity. The resulting complex dossier combines evocations of the ritual itself, with a trial condemning the killing tool, and an etiology that reflects the close links between ploughing and sacrifice. For the ox, beyond its cost, is not a sacrificial animal like any other: it is man's potential helper in his work in the fields or in carrying loads. The ritual construction of this contradiction is evidenced by the etiology of the Bouphonies, within the Dipolies, which also recall the constitutive principles of civilized life: human communities work the land to feed themselves, honor the gods and form a society within the entity that the Greeks call polis and whose sovereignty, in Athens at any rate, Zeus Polieus assures alongside his divine daughter on the Acropolis.
