"Aventine Thorakitoi as Imitation Legionaries" Topic

A key part of many of the Later Successor armies are the "imitation" Legionaries, where Alexander's marshalls decided to copy Rome's successful pilum+sword+shield formula, and have a tentative go at moving beyond the Greek-originated spear+shield approach. This is pretty neat, and adds variety to a wall of pikes or spears, so adding a couple of units of Imitation Legionaries to my Successor collection has always been a bit of a must.

Other than knowing that these guys were copying Roman tactics however, there's not a massive amount of evidence for where they sit on the "Look like Romans <-> Look like Greeks" spectrum, giving a reasonable amount of leeway for choosing figures for them.

And, in the end, I actually didn't even "choose" which figures, instead finding a couple of packs of Aventine guys in the collection of a late clubmate which seemed to fit the bill. It turns out on closer examination of the Aventine website that they are techically Thorakitai, but I felt that the spears that they come with were short enough (and chunky enough) to pass for pilum-style heavy throwing spears.

Adding in some head swaps from the same pack of Aventine heads that I'd used earlier on some of the Phalanx greatly increased their variety.

When combined with gluing the shields on at a variety of heights, and posing them at different angles I ended up creating a couple of units where you really have to look twice to notice that there is only one figure pose for the non-officer infantry.

So, that's pretty much all of the Heavy Infantry for my Successors completed – other than another couple of Phalanxes, which I'm putting off for the time being, as the thought of all that hand-drilling is rather intimidating.

And, of course, being rather lovely Aventine metal figures, these are the "heaviest" of the Heavy Infantry in the army by quite some margin!

Hopefully these guys will make their debut at Beachhead in the ADLG competition this coming weekend (unless I end up playing in the 15mm pool to help even up numbers!)

More pics and more detail about how I did them on the blog: link

I also used those same figures for Imitation Legionnaires for my late Seleucid forces. From what I could find, even though they tried arming them and making it look like a Roman unit, they all just fought as medium infantry (thorakitai) and were swept away by Rome.

They may have been given bigger 'scutum' type shields to give the appearance of legionaries but they weren't fooling anyone and, as stated above, were swept away by Rome. I believe that the Greeks didn't understand what made the Roman system effective so could not duplicate it. Magnificent looking models, by the way.