At Derby a few weeks ago I picked up a wide range of figures from Baccus with a view to putting together an Early Byzantine army for Impetus. As no one does a specific Early range for the Byzantines I was looking at a mix of Late Roman, Sassanid, Goth, Hun types to represent the army. Given the period of transition and the Eastern influences and the ‘mercenary’ nature of the Bucellarii I figured I could get away with this, especially in 6mm!
I’m still waiting for MDF bases to arrives (hopefully before next weeks postal strikes!) but thought I’d post some ‘in progress’ shots. So here are some views of the first Bucellarii based on a Sassanid Late Heavy Cavalry. They have bow, lance and part armoured horse. I would have preferred to have unarmoured horses in the second rank but Baccus are in a transition period with moving to a slightly larger horse and currently the proposed back rank would look like ponies!
The Impetus Justinian list has just been posted in draft and for that I need 4 units of Kavallarioi. These were a bit harder to source. So I’ve taken a Sassanid armoured archer and added a small shield with a bit of green stuff.
And as a lot of the images I’ve seen for Bucellarii have helmets with plumes and with cloaks I thought I ‘d see how easy it was to adapt the Sassanid Heavy Cavalry figure…
Overall I’m rather pleased with them. I think the archer shields may be a tad on the large side but at 6mm I don’t really care and once painted I’m sure they’ll look fine. I will need to do another Bucellarii unit so for that will do a mix with cloak and I’m hoping Peter at Baccus may be able to source me a suitable unarmoured horse type figure.
I’ll post better pictures once they’re all based.