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Hadrian's own horse, Borysthenes, which had had too long a rest, pawed and stamped impatiently in a separate stall, and close at hand the Emperor's retrievers, boar-hounds and harriers were housed in hastily-contrived yards and kennels.
With 175,000 men under the flags, an immense artillery, wagons and innumerable troops, the vast solitude of the ancient Borysthenes was suddenly transformed into a camp. The march continued towards Smolensk: before Krasnoe, after a rather keen fight, General Neveroffskoi was driven back to the town of Korytnia.
A few regarding him as certainly lost, and seeing the enemy threaten the bridges of the Borysthenes, proposed to cut them; but the army was unanimous in their opposition to this measure.
Whatever rude commodities were collected in the forests of Germany and Scythia, and far as the sources of the Tanais and the Borysthenes; whatsoever was manufactured by the skill of Europe or Asia; the corn of Egypt, and the gems and spices of the farthest India, were brought by the varying winds into the port of Constantinople, which for many ages attracted the commerce of the ancient world.
The image of their naval armaments was revived in the last century, in the fleets of the Cossacks, which issued from the Borysthenes, to navigate the same seas for a similar purpose. The Greek appellation of monoxyla, or single canoes, might justly be applied to the bottom of their vessels.
The banks of the Borysthenes are only sixty miles distant from the narrow entrance of the peninsula of Crim Tartary, known to the ancients under the name of Chersonesus Taurica. On that inhospitable shore, Euripides, embellishing with exquisite art the tales of antiquity, has placed the scene of one of his most affecting tragedies.
But the Byzantine nation was servile, solitary, and verging to a hasty decline: after the fall of Kiow, the navigation of the Borysthenes was forgotten; the great princes of Wolodomir and Moscow were separated from the sea and Christendom; and the divided monarchy was oppressed by the ignominy and blindness of Tartar servitude.
It is said that Wladimir, at the commencement of the eleventh century, declared, that all the waters of the Borysthenes were holy, and that plunging in them was sufficient to make a man a Christian; the baptism of the Greeks being performed by immersion, millions of men went into this river to abjure their idolatry.
Between Petersburg and Smolensk is Novgorod; south of Smolensk is Kiev or Little Russia; and Red Russia, or the Ukraine, watered by the Dnieper, the Borysthenes of the Greeks the country of the Cossacks.
Between Orcha and the Borysthenes those conveyances for which there were no longer horses were burned, and the confusion and discouragement became so great that in the rear of the army most of the stragglers threw down their arms as a heavy and useless burden.
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