A Roman army was assembled the way a wall is, out of one block repeated. The block at the bottom was the contubernium — eight men who shared a tent, a millstone, a cooking pot and a mule. Ten of those made a century of eighty. Six centuries made a cohort of four hundred and eighty, and ten cohorts made a legion, except that the first cohort was almost double strength, five outsized centuries of a hundred and sixty apiece, which brought a legion's paper total to something over five thousand two hundred men. Not one of those figures is impressive on its own, and that is precisely the point of them. Rome's advantage was never a single overwhelming army. It was a unit small enough to be trained, fed, housed and commanded properly — and then reproduced, identically, until it reached from Britain to the Euphrates.

This six-figure set is the smallest honest piece of that structure you can put on a shelf: three-quarters of a tent party, caught doing the two things the line existed to do. Three kneel with their shields grounded and locked, three stand behind them at full stretch with the pila going out overhead. The set is made up of three Kneeling Roman Legion and three Standing Roman Legion Throwing Pilum, so it extends seamlessly if you buy either separately — and it wants finishing at the edges rather than the middle. Put Roman Centurion at the flank where he could be seen and The Marching Optios behind the rear rank, and the diorama stops being six men in armour and becomes a unit with someone in charge of it.

Model: ROM064 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 6 piece set