Chloaia February 28

Demeter Chloê is the goddess of “new wheat”, “of budding wheat”, the one who protects the first green shoots of wheat. Therefore, the party Chloe, festival associated with Demeter Chloe and certified by name in certain demes of Attica would be a typically cereal festival.

Another theory concerns the sacrifice of pregnant animals. Indeed Demeter Chloe could have broader implications beyond agricultural growth and consumption.

The festival of Chloe “was celebrated at the moment when the wheat and barley begin to emerge from the earth, when the fields are covered with nascent greenery, the first manifestation of the life that Demeter Chloe makes spring from the ground”.

substantive chloe, although it may refer to cereals (τὰ σιτώδη), leguminous plants (τὰ χεδροπά), or to other plants, when they produce young shoots, constitutes a generic term indicating, in the majority of cases, the nascent grass, that which covers plains and fields with its verdant radiance.

More particularly, chloe designates the greenery of the meadows, even that of the “intact, pure meadow”, which has never known the shepherd's flock or the iron of the plow, as Euripides' Hippolytus says.

This word can also refer to the greenery of gardens, to the grass on which animals feed, as well as to the green foliage of trees and plants, when we speak, for example, of Athena's olive tree (Euripides , Ion, 1433-36), or of the vine and ivy of Dionysus.