ABSTRACT
It is now thought that Greeks from Miletus first settled in the Ukraine in the course of the 6th century BC, though a century earlier has been claimed. Settlement was either coastal or along the banks of the major rivers of the region and their estuaries. By about 550 BC the town of Olbia was established near the modern village of Parutino, on the west shore of the estuary of the river Bug (the Greek Hypanis), when an agora and religious precinct were laid out. Numerous minor Greek settlements fringed the whole estuary around Olbia, while the islet of Berezan just beyond the mouth of the estuary had been settled at the same time as Olbia itself, if not a little earlier. The island was named Borysthenes by the ancient Greeks, as was the great river Dniepr which emptied into the Black Sea immediately to its east, beside the Bug. The name Borysthenes was also attached to Olbia itself, especially in more literary accounts of the town, such as that of Dio Chrysostom, composed about AD 100 (Oration 36). Dio's gloomy account is not to be taken at face value, as archaeology now shows: it is designed to make a philosophical argument about civic culture and harmony, for presentation at Prusa in northwest Asia Minor. Later, in the 10th century, the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (913-59) in his famous survey of his realm looked upon the Dniepr as the principal highway to the first Russian state, the Rus of Kiev, and beyond as far as the Baltic. It was down this river that furs, amber, and mercenaries came into the Byzantine world, including the Varangian bodyguard of the emperor himself.
