The Haloa was celebrated in the month Poseideon (December-January), a fact as surprising as it is ultimately significant. What has a threshing festival to do with mid-winter, when all the grain should be safely housed in the barns? Normally, now as in ancient days, the threshing follows as soon as may be after the cutting of the corn; it is threshed and afterwards winnowed in the _open_ threshing-floor, and mid-winter is no time even in Greece for an open-air operation. The answer is simple. The shift of date is due to Dionysos. The rival festivals of Dionysos were in mid-winter. He possessed himself of the festivals of Demeter, took over her threshing-floor and compelled the anomaly of a winter threshing festival. The latest time that a real threshing festival could take place is Pyanepsion, but by Poseideon it is just possible to have an early _Pithoigia_ and to revel with Dionysos. There could be no clearer witness to the might of the incoming god. As to the nature of the Haloa we learn two important facts from Demosthenes. It was a festival in which the priestess, not the Hierophant, presented the offerings, a festival under the presidency of women; and these offerings were bloodless, no animal victim (ἱερεῖον) was allowed. Demosthenes[375] records how a Hierophant, Archias by name, ‘was cursed because at the Haloa he offered on the _eschara_ in the court of Eleusis burnt sacrifice of an animal victim brought by the courtezan Sinope.’ His condemnation was on a double count, ‘it was not lawful on that day to sacrifice an animal victim, and the sacrifice was not his business but that of the priestess.’ The epheboi[376] offered bulls at Eleusis, and, it would appear, engaged in some sort of ‘bull fight[377],’ but this must have been in honour either of Dionysos or of Poseidon who preceded him: the _vehicle_ of both these divinities was the bull. It was the boast of the archon at the Haloa that Demeter had given to men ‘gentle foods.’