Oscan Auxilia

A bit in from left field is here a post about my recently painted Oscan Auxiliaries. To be honest I got a little bored painting the Iberians, and thought a change of pace would be fine. Better to be painting something than nothing at all.

So here they are. A single unit. 12 men, 2 poses. Or rather one pose, and an officer. I more or less painted these from imagination, rather than a historical source. Then I check the sources and tried to make up for my blunders. A smaller blunder of mine is that perhaps the Oscans never really wore shoes. The officer is clearly wearing some, so perhaps I should have painted them skin color, so he would be barefoot like the rest of them.

Another blunder can be seen on this shield design. Not sure that this color combination ever occured. So to make up for it, I thought I would put a symbol on the shields that was definately Oscan. Turns out its hard to find symbols. Then I got a brainchild, what if I used part of the Oscan Alphabet. And sure enough, it was less hard to find the ancient Oscan alphabet. So I used one of the 21 letters they had as a symbol. A V with a dot in it.

The officer is perhaps not an officer, but just another Oscan. However he is heavily armored and with a cupped hand. I put a sword in it. The shield is also glued on. Both are from the HäT set which these figures are from.

This is then a small unit, by some standards, of just 12 men, but with just one pose it felt like there where more, when painting them. The standard pose is unarmored, and just has a shield and spear, so they are Auxilia. They are basically painted generically enough to represent any Oscan tribe, the tribes of ancient Italy, before Rome took all of it.

~Claus