The man saluting here was almost certainly not a Roman. Auxiliaries were raised from the peregrini — free provincial subjects without Roman citizenship — and they served twenty-five years for a third of a legionary's pay, three hundred sesterces a year. What they were really paid in came at the end. On honourable discharge an auxiliary was granted Roman citizenship, and so were all of his children, the whole thing recorded on a folding bronze tablet he could carry and produce as proof: the military diploma. For a provincial family that was a document which changed the generation after it. And there were more of these men than there were legionaries — by the second century the auxilia fielded as much infantry as the legions and made up three-fifths of Rome's regular land forces, something over two hundred and twenty thousand men under Hadrian against about a hundred and fifty-five thousand citizen soldiers. The army that held the empire together was mostly not Roman.

Everything about the figure says auxiliary rather than legionary: mail instead of segmented plate, a flat oval shield instead of the curved rectangular scutum, a spear instead of the pilum. The gesture is worth a word too. Raised-hand salutes are genuinely Roman — they appear on monuments for greeting, for acclamation, for a commander addressing troops — and Roman teachers of rhetoric held that the hand should not go above the level of the eyes, which is roughly where this one stops. The straight-armed salute most people picture is not Roman at all: it appears in no Roman text and on no Roman monument, and was invented for a French painting in 1784 before spreading through Victorian theatre and early cinema. Show him with The New Roman Legions to make the equipment contrast obvious, put Roman Centurion opposite as the man being saluted, or use him where King & Country intended — a provincial soldier in a Judaean street scene with Jesus Enters Jerusalem.

Model: LOJ022 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set