In keeping with what has become something of a Eureka Miniatures tradition, our first offering for the New Year is from AB Figures. Tony Barton has added marching-order legionaries, baggage wagons, and a mule train to his range of 15/18mm Romans for the Early Imperial period (c.AD19). For the collectors and painters of larger figures, Tony has also created a range of 40mm Roman and Ancient German presentation miniatures.
The AB Figures range of 15mm Romans was originally a commission that Tony Barton completed for an archaeology museum display in Germany. The figures were used to depict the appearance and organisation of a Roman Legion around the time of Germanicus' campaign (c.AD19) to suppress revolting Germanic tribes and recover the lost standards of the Legions destroyed in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Tony subsequently made these finely sculpted miniatures available to the wider public, and they have been very popular with wargamers recreating Roman armies for the First Century AD ever since. Last year, the 2000th anniversary of the momentous battle in the Teutoburg Forest saw Tony revisiting this range. After more than a century of speculation, recent archaeological research and excavation have now finally identified the likely site of the Teutoburg battle and the last stand of the Roman Legions as Kalkriese, near Osnabrück. A new museum and archaeology park have been constructed on the site, and as part of the anniversary commemorations, the Kalkriese Museum asked Tony to make a selection of marching Roman legionaries and baggage train items so they could create a huge display depicting the doomed Roman army on the march through the forest.
These figures are the result of that commission, and Eureka Miniatures can now offer them as an extension to the existing AB Figures range of early First Century 15mm Romans. The legionaries are depicted in 'marching order', with shields slung on their backs and helmets hung from waist belts. There are eight different variants (supplied at random) to give your marching Roman columns a pleasing, realistic appearance, rather than having serried ranks of identical clones. The mule train set includes handlers and seven different mules with their loads, and is bound to find its way into a host of Roman baggage trains, as will many of the wagons. These are available as two basic wagon types with a driver, and then each wagon can be ordered with a choice of three different loads.
We have also taken this opportunity to redesign some aspects of the original range of AB Figures 15mm Romans. We have done away with the separate shields (by popular demand), and all the legionaries now come with their shields as a cast-on integral part of the figure. Tony Barton is a proponent of the theory that Roman shields were not identical within each unit; they being hand-made items often purchased by individual legionaries from local craftsmen (or, at best, regional contractors). So there is some deliberate random variation in the shield shapes and designs supplied. There is little evidence to show that the state systematically manufactured bulk quantities of identical shields for its legions (only Trajan's Column implies some degree of standardization by the Second Century). The popular view of uniform ranks of Roman legionaries sporting exactly the same universal shield perhaps has more to do with the preferences of 19th Century historians and archaeologists, whose imperialist conditioning saw the Roman army as an always logical, totally standardized organisation in keeping with their own ideal world view.
The 40mm Roman figures should make an interesting diversion, for those of you who enjoy painting nicely sculpted, larger scale miniatures. They were part of the same commission Tony Barton undertook for the Kalkriese Museum, and depict the various different levels of Roman society. There is the Emperor (at the top - obviously!) and then below him come the senatorial class, followed by the citizens, and then the whole lot supported by the vast numbers of slaves that underpinned the entire Roman economy. Finally we have a selection of German tribespeople, who - like other conquered (but not enslaved) peoples of the Roman Empire, or those that still lived free on the empire's fringes - probably spent half their time yearning to become Roman citizens (with all its potential material benefits)... and the other half wanting to just trash the place!
Here are the catalogue details for the new miniatures:
NEW AB Figures: 15mm Romans
Sculpted by Tony Barton
AB-ROM11 Legionary, in marching order
AB-ROM12 Mule train: handlers and seven mules
AB-ROM13a Baggage wagon: Wagon 1, load A
AB-ROM13b Baggage wagon: Wagon 1, load B
AB-ROM13c Baggage wagon: Wagon 1, load C
AB-ROM14a Baggage wagon: Wagon 2, load A
AB-ROM14b Baggage wagon: Wagon 2, load B
AB-ROM14c Baggage wagon: Wagon 2, load C
NEW AB Figures: 40mm Romans
Designed and sculpted by Tony Barton
700ROM01 Roman Emperor (1)
700ROM02 Roman Senator (1)
700ROM03 Roman male citizen (1)
700ROM04 Roman female citizen (1)
700ROM05 Male slave (1)
700ROM06 Female slave (1)
700ROM07 German male (3)
700ROM08 German female (1)
NEW RELEASE SPECIAL OFFER
The "What have the 40mm Romans ever done for us?" Deal
A complete ten-figure set of all the figures and available variants from Tony Barton's 40mm Roman range of presentation figures for the special price of $78.00 AUD* (normally $90.00 AUD).
* Excluding postage and 'Goods and Services Tax' payable by Australian customers only
You can also order these AB Figures Romans from our representatives in North America, Eureka Miniatures U.S.A.; and in the U.K. from Fighting 15s.