15 mm Pyrrhic Cavalry (Donnington "Originals")

Background

In 2024 I took a Late Macedonian army to the King in the North competition. I had originally planned to use borrowed figures, but was lucky enough to finish painting everything I needed in time for the October event.

I wanted to begin with a fairly plain, almost “vanilla”, Hellenistic army that I could adapt afterwards into other, more exotic forces. As it turned out, the Late Macedonian army was perhaps a little too plain. It’s very solid, but it lacks a certain something in competitions. There aren’t quite enough units with real striking power, and I found myself relying too heavily on a small number of pike units to both hold the line and breakthrough.

After several competitions, I began browsing through the Art de la Guerre (ADLG) army lists to see what other options I might have. I briefly considered a Seleucid army, but eventually settled on a Pyrrhic army. That choice meant I needed to paint a few extra units: elephants, some hoplites, and of course some different cavalry.

Appropriate cavalry

These new cavalry units caused me the most "trouble".

The nature of Hellenistic cavalry changed significantly between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, with major variations in weapons, armour, helmets - and most notably - the use of shields.

For my Late Macedonians, I used Greek cavalry (Xyston) for the heavy cavalry and Illyrian cavalry (Forged in Battle) for the light and medium cavalry. All without shields and, as I found later, a little too early for either a Late Macedonian or Pyrrhic army.

From my (limited) research, I found that Greek cavalry were generally without shields before the 3rd century BC, aside from the ever-present Tarantine mercenaries. After that point, shields became more common for all cavalry types, with many sources dating this change to around 279–270 BC. See my notes for more details and army timelines for ADLG and Mortem et Gloriam (MeG).

It’s also believed that Pyrrhus himself helped popularise the use of shields, so I wanted to include medium and heavy cavalry carrying them.

Shield types

The key question then became: what type of shields, and how large should they be?

First, I consulted the still-useful 1980s classic Armies of the Macedonian & Punic Wars (AMPW), which depicts only large, round cavalry shields. I then asked the AI at perplexity.ai: “When did cavalry shields become common in the Hellenistic period?” The answer agreed with AMPW but also mentioned oblong shields (from the 3rd century BC onwards) and thureos-type oval shields (from the 2nd century onwards). The latter were curved, oval shields similar to those carried by infantry of the same era.

For a Pyrrhic army, it seems most appropriate to use cavalry models with large round shields, perhaps with a few oval ones added for variety. I also decided that the heavy cavalry would have bronze faced shields, and the medium cavalry white painted ones: both good, solid wargaming clichés.

Purchases

I wanted this period to have an "old school" look and I ended up using mainly Essex and Forged in Battle figures with some Donnington "Originals" here and there.

When I started this project, I bought and painted various samples from Donnington to see what I could do with them. When the time came to paint the Pyrrhic cavalry I bought more; enough to make four units of medium cavalry and two of heavy cavalry. Not exactly a lot, but I didn't want to waste any of the samples I'd bought. I used these models:

• HC04 Thracian Cavalry (throwing javelin )
• HC06 Aitolian/Hellenistic Greek Heavy Cavalry (javelin, shield, (2 variants)
• HC07 Successor Cavalry (javelin, shield, 2 variants)
• HC10 Antigonid Heavy Cavalry (spear, ribbed shield)
• HC15 Late Seleucid Thracian Mercenary Cavalry (tunic, spear, cloak, oval shield)

HC04, 06 & 10 are best suited for heavy cavalry, and HC07 & 15 for medium cavalry. I decided to keep HC07 & 15 in separate units. With different shields they would be easily recognisable on the table.

Later, I bought a large pack (that is before the recent price rise) of suitable cavalry from Forged in Battle:

• WE-TH01 Thracian Heavy Cavalry

I plan to use these for both light and medium cavalry, but they are still unpainted and lurking in the lead pile.

Figure review

The Donnington figures are old sculpts and the riders have deeply incised details in places. The horses are excellent and required little cleaning. The riders needed a bit more work.

I only had one HC04 figure (third from the left), and it needed a shield. I was able to scrounge a Xyston hoplite shield which is exactly the right size. The adapted figure matched nicely with both HC06 & HC10.

All six heavy cavalry figures needed work on the cloaks. As supplied the detail on the cloaks is too sharp and not at all flowing. This makes them an absolute pain to paint. To fix this I first used greenstuff but quickly switched to Vallejo plastic putty. The latter is water based, and a couple of thinned layers soon produced smoother more flowing cloaks.

In contrast, the cloaks on HC15 were well sculpted. I suspect they were later additions to the range.

Photo review

Here's a close up of of HC15 from the front:

Finally, here are some close ups of HC07:

Closing remarks

Thankfully there's not a lot of cavalry in my Pyrrhic army list so these six units will do nicely until I have painted the Forged in Battle Thracians. It was fun, and challenging, tackling these older sculpts as well as researching the changing nature of Greek cavalry during the Hellenistic period: I learnt a lot.

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