Tonight I painted a mounted Celt. Just the one, but all done bar the basing.
I also stuck my debased miniatures onto some MDF circular ones. My order from Warbases came yesterday so I now have sixty new ones which should keep me going for a while. Sadly in reality this won’t last me that long as I just realised I have forty already painted that will need basing! Whoops!
Well luckily I have to order some bases for the chariots and now the extra cavalry… see how much this lot costs!
I am now the proud owner of a school of dubious gladiators.
So from left to right we sort of have a dimachearus with his two swords, they are meant to be sicas but, I had gladius handy.
Next is a guy with an axe…. Errr there is no known reference to an axe wielding gladiator… there is a gladiator in the Galleria Borghese in Rome that is sometimes confusing as part of it is missing and a foot is behind a guy with a gladius… when you look at a picture it kind of does look a bit like an axe at first glance, in a poor light and the wish to see an axe!
Next up is a quasi hoplomacus with his spear and round shield.
Next up a thraex with his sica and parmulata (small shield). These shields were usually rectangular. The sica’s curved blade was designed to reach beyond a scutum and do damage to the shoulder of the opponent.
Next in the front is the murmillo. Outside of a retiarius this is probably the most iconic of the gladiators. Think gladiator and most people think of him. Generally he would fight the thraex and hoplomachus.
Front right is a bit of a sort of weird retiarius. I say weird as his trident isn’t as it has four prongs. I also stuck the arms on the wrong body so this one has ocrea (greaves) on his legs. This guy would generally fight the secutor. And not the murmillo as was originally thought. They did pair up and indeed in one bout a retiarius was purported to be on a raised platform with a pile or rocks. A ladder was at each end with a murmillo at the bottom. I cannot remember where this came from, so it definitely isn’t gospel.
At the back I made another sort of retiarius, with a spear this time. I cut the spear point off the original end and gave it a different look to the other one.
As for footwear, on the whole they didn’t wear any. Some confusion comes from the mosaics where leg wraps come down to the foot.
I am going to have a fiddle about and see what other types I can make. A laquerius should be easy enough spear and a lasso instead of a net and trident. A bestiarius or venatore should be easy enough to too. And as for a poor noxxi – some poor dude with just a sword, if he was lucky fighting one of the types above. I might be able to do an eques… all I need is a horse and an ancient rider. Add gladiator arms an helmet and voila!
I hope!
So last night after having another failure I decided that enough was enough and that i Would relevel the bed. Good job I checked as although the front bolt was well and truly solid, thse side one was decidedly loose.
So I took out the resin, did a tank clean, which I had never done before and relevelled the plate. I gave some 40mm Gladiators another go. Yesterday I got two bodies and nothing else, today I got everything.
I am doing a reprint of the pair I printed the other day.
Hopefully I will get everything printed on that one too. Everything seems to have printed properly.
Today i did battle with the rotten floorboards in the lounge… i won, but it was a close run thing… This is the joys of a 200 year old house that has no foundations and everything sits directly on the ground (the floor is about 6 inches above the soil). After feeling quite proud of myself, I found some more that need replacing… i must admit i did say the off naughty word, especially as I had just nailed the replacements down. if i had noticed earlier my life would have been easier as i could have used the spaces i had made to eaily remove the extra bits…
Tonight I printed off four gladiators for the kids in the Geek Club.
Now okay I am a bit of a Gladiator Geek and these representations are a bit odd. These were prebuilt by Wargames Atlantic. There is a bit of a swapsy going on here. As an example the Hoplimachus is using a scutum instead of a parmularii and he seems to have lost his helmet. But before I write a whole essay and bore the pants off everyone, I had better get back on topic. So as I mentioned in an earlier post, these miniatures are round about the same size as Perry miniatures. My Geek club is used to painting things that are a bit bigger. So I did an arbitrary 140% increase… these are now 40mm miniatures! Whoops.
