Everyone knows what the pilum did — the soft iron shank bent on impact so the enemy could not throw it back. It is a fine story and it is probably not the right one. Plutarch credits Marius with replacing one of the two rivets with a wooden pin so the shaft would twist sideways, but the archaeology from the 80s BC through the early empire shows that redesign was never taken up, and M. C. Bishop's later work concludes that a pilum is unlikely to bend from its own momentum at all; much of the bending we dig up looks like the work of men wrenching them out badly afterwards. What the experiments do support is simpler and rather worse. The weapon is two metres long and weighs between one and two and a half kilos, and behind its small pyramidal head runs an iron shank six hundred millimetres long and seven thick. The head punches a neat hole through a shield, the shank follows it through, and it keeps going far enough to reach the man holding it. A pilum lodged in a shield is also very hard to pull free, so the shield becomes unmanageable and gets thrown away. Same outcome as the legend — a disarmed enemy — by a nastier route.

King & Country catch him at full extension, weight going forward, the scutum swung high to cover the man crouched beside him. That is the moment the whole system turns on: a legionary carried two pila and loosed them at fifteen or twenty metres, close enough that the enemy had no time to recover before he came on behind them with the gladius drawn. His segmented armour places him in the imperial legions, a good century after the mail-clad soldiers Gaius Julius Caesar led into Gaul — worth knowing if you are building to a period. He is designed to stand over Kneeling Roman Legion, and a diorama gets its rhythm once you extend that pairing along a line with The New Roman Legions and put Roman Centurion at the end of it.

Model: ROM061 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set