Here is the start of my Pontic army. I was busting my butt to get as much painting done before the move and was working on these at the same time as my Gallo-Romans. The army is not completely painted and this will be an on-going post with many updates as I get units painted. The bulk of the army is made up of an
Old Glory 15's starter army and a
Forged in Battle Early Ponitc starter army with some
Xyston and
Essex command figures thrown in.
The composition and size of the army conforms (mostly) with the
Field of Glory maxima in the army lists.
The thing with the Pontic army is that there are really no extant descriptions of what they looked like. So I took the inevitable artistic liberties and interpreted the information we do have the best I could. Invaluable was Thion's
Le Soldat Lagide. Although I neither speak nor read that magnificent language of French, the computer generated illustrations of Ptolemy's Successor army quickly became my main painting guide. I use a lot of blues, maroons, whites, wine-stain, purples, roses and magentas in my pallet for this army. Just seems right to me, being a (mostly) littoral country on the Black Sea as well as heavily Persian influenced.
My pallet for skin tones varies greatly just as the Pontic army was by no means ethnically homogenous. For point of reference I used my own experience from vacations in Side, southern Turkey and Crete. For paints I used Foundry skin tones:
Near Eastern and
Mediterranean Flesh for Anatolians, Syrians, Persians and Greeks;
African Flesh for Nubians;
North African Flesh for, well, North Africans as well as some Anatolians and Iberians; and
Basic Flesh for Celts, Sarmatians, Scythians, and Bastarnae/Thracians.
I am trying to use Greek mythological symbology that also overlaps into Persian mythology on my shields. For instance, we are familiar with Pegasus being a Greek mythological creature but, known as
Pegaz in Persian, was also important to them as well.
Pegaz was also Mithradates' personal symbol. For my early army units, the symbology will be more Hellenistic because Mith was really big on propaganda and in the early years was courting the fickle Hellenistic city-states of Anatolia to turn on the Roman occupiers. After the first Mithradatic War, he gave up on them and turned to his Persian background (famously climbing the mountain to light the fire honouring Zeus-Stratios like the Persian kings of old.) So imitation legionaries will have dual Greek/Persian gods on their shields, for instance (Hercules, Mithras, Zeus Stratios, etc.)
ΜιθραδάτηςThe command stand with old Mith himself in the center on the white horse. His banner (a 28mm Gripping Beast cavalry Vexilla on a .05mm wire) is a combination of his profile (with Elvis chops) attested to on ancient Pontic coinage and the lion's headdress found on the bust from the Musée du Louvre. Although he is helmeted, Mith was known for wearing a simple blue and white headband, so that's reflected on the headband around the gold enamelled helmet. His skin tone is Foundry's Near Eastern Flesh but I used only the light tone as his complexion supposedly "glowed pale" due to the arsenic in his blood. He is holding a a gold and maroon sceptre. There is a famous illustration on the google machine of Mithras handing Mithradates the sceptre of kingship, so this figure really is perfect for Mithradates.
The Pontic army banner is the Pontic comet over a sickle moon, which is also attested to on the back face of ancient Pontic coinage.
His general's shield design was taken from, ahem, Total War's
Rome II. It's a white lion-sphinx on a deep maroon field. But I liked the design and lacking anything definitive for shield designs, I thought it would work for a general from Colchis or Sinope. Note the Persian trousers and leopard skin on the horse.
I like to put the commander's name on the command bases for some additional personality. Here is Mithradates in ancient Greek, written in stone, so to speak. (Mithr
idates, was the preferred Latin spelling.)
I. InfantryThe Krakens of Trapezos (Chalybes, Χάλυβες)
Yes, another shield design taken from Rome II
. This time a white kraken on a teal blue field. These guys are basic spearmen using the Black Sea Spearmen models from FiB.
Bastarnae MercenariesThis unit is mainly composed of raw and natural dark woollens with some deep reds mixed in.
Brazen Shields (Chalkaspides / Χαλκάσπιδες)
Here is my famous Brazen shields. These are FiB Asiatic Phalangites. Note to anyone contemplating ordering a Pontic starter army from FiB: You get regular Macedonian phalangites with greaves in the army, so if you wish to have trousers, make sure you make a special request with your order. The question of whether Pontic phalangites had greaves or trousers is up in the air, but there is an ancient (ahem) thread over at TMP with three pages or so of debate on the subject. I went with trousers because I lean that way in the debate and also to set them apart from other successors if I decide, for instance, to build a Seleucid army in the far future.
This is the FoG maxima of twelve bases to a unit. Like others have said on the boards, I like to have my phalanxes look like phalanxes: a sea of sarissas in close order. This formation works with
Field of Glory and
Impetus but I will have to reduce them to three ranks for something like
LadG.
The sarissas have a joinder made of 2mm masking tape. I'm not sure how well that turned out since the tape tends to peel and I've tried going over them with white glue and trimming the excess.
The movement trays are homemade based off an idea I got from Bacchus 6mm. The fronts are deep to protect the sarissas during transportation in the box and also to protect somebody else's Romans when they're placed base-to-base. I'd hate to have someone's paint job scratched from the metal points. The trays have magnetic sheeting on the bottom (and they didn't move in they magnetic boxes during our move to Weimar) as well as where the bases themselves sit.
Had I gotten a hold of the Connolly book before I based them, I would have put the command in the rear rank as a supernumerary position. Unfortunately they were already based with forward leaning sarrissas in the front ranks. So all of my Pontic phalanxes will be based this way for consistency. However, in the slave phalanx below, extra FiB figures are used as junior officers on the ends of the front ranks, which, according to Connolly, seem to be leadership positions in the phalanx.
Freed Slave PhalanxThis unit is particular to Mithradates' army of the First Pontic War. Mithradates, in order to make his less-than-reliable Anatolian-Hellenistic allies just as guilty as he, carried out one of the most remarkably secret intelligence operations in history: no leaks! The Asian Vespers was the night when Mith coordinated the massacre of every Roman citizen and Latin speaker: men, women and children, in sacred temples or not. Slaves, who did not give up and renounce their Roman masters were not spared.
The ones who renounced their masters were freed and many men were formed into a phalangite unit. They may not have been very well trained but they fought hard as their lives literally depended on it. Ex-slaves were crucified by the Romans.
I can no longer recall who makes these figures, but they were advertised as "poorly-equipped phalangites." They were perfect for the slave unit. The shields are perhaps a bit large but that just gave more real estate to paint on. Since they had no unit history, their shields are just painted with the Pontic comet and sickle moon. Sarrissas are plain wood instead of decorated and they are wearing dull and natural woollen tunics. The junior officers on the ends of the ranks are extra FiB phalangites as I would assume that the slave unit, no matter how hastily thrown together, would have to have some experienced officers.
Note the standard. I used the ancient Greek word, in capital letters, for "body":
sōma – used in the context of emancipation. It was the perfect answer to painting a banner that is so short (Xyston.)
This is the most heterogenous unit of the army when it comes to skin tones as I figured that the slaves would have come from all over the Mediterranean and Europe where the Romans had already conquered.
PhalanxAnd here they are together. There is only one more phalanx to paint, the White Shields as they were usually regimented together with Brazen Shields in the Successor armies
II. CavalryMith had cavalry...
lot's of cavalry! So here is a start.
The Riders of the Medusa (Heavy Cavalry)
These are some of my favourites. They will be brigaded with their (yet unpainted) sister-unit,
The Flames of Prometheus. The painting style was taken from an illustration of a very finely painted shield of some god in Osprey's
The Army of Alexander the Great., I just changed it to a medusa head (based on a fresco and a brooch combined together) with writhing snakes and open mouths.
Sarmartian Mercenary Heavy CavalryDisappointed in myself with these guys. I had primed this unit with AP Plate Mail, inked and dry brushed the horses, based and flocked them... then remembered that I wanted to paint many of the horses with bone and leather armour as well. Too late. They're not bad, just not as diverse as I originally planned (and then forgot
)
Scythian Mercenary Horse ArchersI may have to retake pictures of these guys and a few others. I went into detail with Scythian patterns on the clothes and horse blankets but it seems the morning sun shadows them.
III. Scythed ChariotsWho doesn't like scythed chariots? These were fun. I got bored with typical mono-color plumes. Then I remembered from our vacation in Side, that there were free-roaming peacocks all over the hotel grounds. Peacock plumes seemed to be eastern/Anatolian/Persian enough to try on scythed chariots. Again, the morning sun, the spots in the top middle are hard to see, but this is the best I could do on 15mm.
I was reading somewhere, that the ancients liked to have teams of stallions of the same color. So I have two teams of white and two teams of black.
IV. Camp and BaggageExcept for the extra Kraken figure I had, this is all Baueda. I had been waiting for the Hellenistic Camp to come out and I finally emailed Claudio about the projected release date. He replied that it was being released later that day, in fact. I ordered as soon as the product was listed and probably got one of the first ones.
It's a nice camp, fit to FoG standard. The stakes are not straight but natural branches as supposedly it was easier for the pikemen to carry them along with their sarrissas, according to the description on Baueda. There are gaps between the gate doors and wall because the gate is removable. It's attached with two pins to pin-holes in the base. When removed, as stand of infantry will fit in the gateway.
The standard is another 28mm GB vexillium and the tent, vases, and field kitchen are also Baueda. The wild pig on the spit turned out nice. I used salmon-rose to paint it, then dry-brushed in burnt black, and finally coated with a red clear-coat to give the shiny effect of the juices running out. Mmmm, now I'm getting hungry. I could eat a whole wild pig!
SourcesBrzezinski, R. & M. Mielczarek.
The Sarmartians: 600 BC - AD 450. Osprey Men-at-Arms 373, 2002.
Cernenko, E.V.
The Sythians: 700-300 BC. Osprey Men-at-Arms 137, 1983.
Connolly, Peter.
Greece and Rome at War. Pen & Sword, 2016
Duggen, Alfred.
He Died Old. Peter Davies Limited, 1974.
Matyszak, Philip.
Mithradates the Great: Rome's Indomitable Enemy. Pen & Sword, 2015.
Mayor, Adrienne.
The Poison King: Rome's Deadliest Enemy. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Plutarch.
Fall of the Roman Republic. Penguin Classics, 2005.
Sekunda, Nick.
The Army of Alexander the Great. Osprey Men-at-Arms 148, 1984.
Thion, Stéphane.
Le Soldat Lagide: de Ptolémée Ier Sôter à Cléopȃtre. Tenues du Passé. (no date given)
Webber, Christopher.
The Thracians: 700 BC - AD 46. Osprey Men-at-Arms 360, 2008.
Wilcox, Peter.
Rome's Enemies (3): Parthians & Sassanid Persians. Osprey Men-at-Arms 175, 2008
Hope you like.
And, as always, suggestions as well as criticism are always welcome
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September 03, 2010, 03:42:14 PM