Tarentine Pike Phalanx

I've been meaning to come back to my Pyrrhic project for sometime now and finally got around to doing so with some Tarentines. The Tarentines are famous for their cavalry, but they did need infantry as well. These represent some of those citizen soldiers trained to fight in the Hellenistic fashion using pikes. I'm not sure if they switched from hoplites to phalangites through the influence of Pyrrhus or were introduced earlier to this style.

My approach to painting them was to make them colorful and rather individual looking. This served to give them a less uniformed look then the better trained Phyrric phalangites and further distinguish them. It was great fun painting in several bright colors if perhaps time consuming. I also arranged the the them with the heavier armoured to the front and progressively lighter armoured to the rear.

The figures are from the fantastic Pyrrhic range from Aventine miniatures which are easily among the best ancient figures around in my opinion and an absolute pleasure to paint. The shields are transfers from LBM and while I highly recommend them I find transfers do not adhere to oval shields very well(yes I did the pre-cuts) and so that took some extra adjustments. I also painted some extra highlights on the edging and free space on the shields as well as a little on the designs as well to help blend the transfer and bring the design out a little more.

I originally started with a slightly darker basing on my first Pyrrhic unit, but decided I wanted something a little lighter so lighted up the base on this unit to give a more southern Mediterranean look and I am happy with the results. I have since re-did my other units to match this.

Lately Nick and I have been playing a lot of Impetus and having a great time which has really motivated me to continue painting more Impetus units so I will be adding another unit to this project soon. They way things are going this could be a real banner year for me in getting some progress on my ancients/medieval as I want get some cavalry for my Germanics, cavalry and infantry for my Romans so we can game a Roman civil war and light infantry next for my Pyrrhic army plus I purchased some Republican Romans. Lots of plans!

Collecting  a Pyrrhic army is a very fine army to collect as it offers quite a few different troop types to collect along with enemies like Rome, Carthage, Sparta and other Hellenistic opponents which if you collect the enemies leads to Peloponnesian War and Punic Wars and....well you get the idea.

Thanks for viewing!:-)
Miniature Company- Aventine miniatures