Roman soldiers were nicknamed mules, and they had earned it. A legionary on the march carried his armour, his weapons, his cooking gear, his rations and his digging tools, and on top of all that the sharpened stakes for the palisade — which means a legion moving up a road was carrying its own fort on its back and could throw a ditch and a stockade around itself wherever it chose to halt. The nickname was muli Mariani, Marius' mules, and the usual story is that Marius invented the practice to cut down his baggage train. The nickname is genuine. The invention is not: forcing soldiers to shoulder their own equipment was something several successful generals of the period did, Metellus and Scipio Aemilianus among them. Modern specialists have gone further and taken apart the whole notion of a coherent package of "Marian reforms," calling it a construct of nineteenth-century scholarship — the army changed through the Social War and the civil wars that followed, out of circumstance rather than one man's vision.

King & Country give you two of them advancing in step, pila upright, scuta carried at the side rather than braced — the posture of men going somewhere, not fighting yet. Sets like this are bought in multiples for a reason: rhythm only appears in a column once you have six or eight identical figures, and two at a time is how a line gets built. Break the rhythm at the front with Standing Roman Legion Throwing Pilum and Kneeling Roman Legion where the column meets trouble, or march the whole thing through Roman Triumphal Arch for a triumph diorama — then put Roman Soldiers at Ease off to one side, because the march is what these men did most, and stopping is what they wanted.

Model: ROM082 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 2 piece set