My Belisarians
This is a 25/28mm army that I have had since the early 1980s. I had started gaming when I was in Junior High. My best friend Scott Abbot and I pooled our money and bought a copy of Avalon Hill's Battle of the Bulge game and played the heck out of it. We graduated to SPI games and then we found a group of gamers at Iowa State University called the Conflict Simulation Association. They played on Saturdays. The afternoons were dedicated to historical miniatures and the evenings were reserved for D&D.
We all liked to play miniatures like Microarmor and 1/1200 ships, but my eyes got big as the moon when I saw the guys play ancients. My good friend John Ewoldt had the BEST army any of us had ever seen: what used to be called in WRG 5th ed, Basilian Byzantines. John is a true artist in every sense of the word and when he brought up his Byzantines to play everyone wanted to push around his beautiful figures and learn the tricks of the painting trade that he knew so well.
I bought bits and pieces of Classical armies (Republican Romans, Successor Greeks, Pergamum, etc., but the bulk of my guys were always painted by someone else. I did paint units here and there to beef things up, but on the whole my first armies were not my own. As I was in High School (graduated in 1978) and then in college, I did not have access to many resources, so what I had was a mixed bag of figures of mixed manufacturers (mostly Minifigs with some Hinchliffe and Laming thrown in) that had no unity to them.
When I got to be a senior in college and was headed for graduate school, I decided to take some of my income and begin to build an army that was MINE. It would be an army that I bought from the ground up, paint ALL of the figures, and make something (I hoped) as beautiful as what John Ewoldt had. I knew that John had the "Rolls Royce" of Byzantine armies (the Basilians - called Nikephorians in WRG 6th ed), but I wanted to do Byzantines. I was in love with the Empire and when I was an undergrad and struggling with Greek, I thought I would one day become a professional historian who worked on the Byzantine Empire. Of course, I did end up being a professional historian, just not a Byzantanist. So, I looked for another Byzantine period. I did not want to do Late-Byzantines because they were from a dying Empire. One of John's friends, Greg Bell who lived in Newton, had a large Heraclian Byzantine army, so it seemed silly to duplicate effort there. Thus, I settled on Belesarians. Of course, that was a "perfect choice." The army offered good, solid, elite regular cavalry that were colorful, solid infantry, and a plethora of "barbarian scum" to flesh out the army.
As things turned out, I picked a good period to game and a great time to do it. Citadel Miniatures in the UK had recently released a whole bunch of Dark Age figures and they had a truly AWESOME line of Goths/Lombards/Carolingians and Huns that were sculpted by these two brothers named Michael and Alan Perry. At that time I had NO idea of who these two were, but I did know that the lines of figures that they had designed had a lot of different poses within them and that their figures looked like the would just walk off their bases when you weren't looking. Although I did not know who Alan and Michael were then, I DID know that I wanted all of their figures that I could get my hands on. So, I began to build an army......
I started with the Byzantine cavalry, above. They represent the "regular" core of the army and were painted in the early and mid 80s. They are 2nd generation Minifigs Ltd except for the general on the right. He is an Old Glory figure from the 90s and is the Belesarius figure made by Old Glory. I painted him about 2014. By today's standards the old Minifigs are crude and unimaginative figures with little detail on the model. Except for the officer in the units, the figures are all in the same pose. I used Minifigs for the Byzantine portion of the army mainly because they did Belesarians and the figures were ok. Having the same pose gave these units the a very standard appearance as the stalwart defenders of Civilization I imagined them to be.
There was a lot of debate in the Ancient's Community in the 1980s about whether or not Belesarian Kataphraktoi wore horse armor. The WRG 5th & 6th ed lists let you have one unit, so I painted one. Ian Heath found from his research (published by WRG) that there was at least one unit called "Leones Clibanarii" (literally the "covered in lions [i.e. the lions covered in armor]), so I had to paint that unit. Of course the shield designs were made up.
The armies of Justinian, led by Belesarius and Narses among others, were supplemented by large numbers of what the Byzantines called "Ethnikoi" or ethnic troops. Alan and Michael had sculpted a bunch of Goths (for use with both Italian Ostrogothic and Spanish Visitoghic armies) as well as a bunch of Carolingian and Lombard cavalry. Because they had so many different poses I got my hands on as many different guys as possible. I really wanted to contrast my "stayed, regular Byzantine cavalry" with "wild barbarians." Here are my twenty Goth cavalry.
The guy in the two photos above it my Goth General/Byzantine Sub-commander. In my opinion he is one of the finest models ever made. I have always been strongly drawn to these figures and I worked hard to do them justice in my twenties. This guy was painted in the early 80s. In those days I followed John Ewoldt's painting style of a white primer overall and then layer painting the entire figure. After I was done I did a heavy black wash to bring out the detail in the model. It worked, but it really dulled down the figure. The gloss coat that went over the top of the figure to protect it, did help brighten it up a bit, but still the figure was pretty dark. For barbarians that was ok, because they should be dirty and "barbaric," no? I did not use the black wash on the shield.
These two photos are from the 2010s when I got ten more of these Goths (unpainted) from Dr. Madison who no longer wanted them. These were painted with the "new" Ewoldt method: flat black primer, heavy white dry brush to bring out the detail, then layer, drybrush, or wash (depending on what you want to do) various parts of the remainder of the figure. The shield designs are historical but the colors are a best guess.
In these two you can see the effects of the black wash better. These were done in the early to mid 80s. In my opinion, these Huns are some of the finest models ever made.
Of course, one has to have infantry and Belesarius's army had lots of good infantry. As I said, in the early 1980s I was an undergrad and had no money so I made due with what I could get my hands on. One of my gaming group had a bunch of these Middle Imperial Roman Auxilia they sold me for cheap. I had x24 of them and decided to make Belesarian Skutatoi with them. I figured that they would be a "temporary measure" until I could get some proper Skutatoi. They were ok and painted up ok as well.
I also needed archers. These guys were Ral Partha and I got them cheap as well in the 1980s. They were rebased in the 2000's to form the back of my "Civic Militia" unit after I replaced them with newer and better figures.
The Belesarians also had solid light infantry to act as support units for both the heavy infantry and cavalry, as well as troops to occupy rough terrain and woods. I had two units of twelve Psiloi (x6 javelin men and x6 archers). The archers are old Hinchliffe and the javelin men are Minifig.
Here are the "new" (2010's) Skutatoi that I painted. There are x24 of these guys. They are from Wargames Foundry and much heftier than the old Minifigs and Ral Partha.
Even though Foundry makes a lot of Romans in different poses I wanted to keep with my theme of having all my Regular Byzantines look regular so I bought them all in the same pose.
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