CAUTION. This article discusses practices some people may find upsetting.

All armies need discipline to function, but how that is maintained varies widely throughout history. One less well known form of military punishment was decimation, the Roman practice of executing one man in ten from a unit that was deemed to have committed some terrible transgression such as cowardice in the face of the enemy. Exactly how this worked seems to have varied, but sometimes the men were grouped into tens, and one in each group was chosen by lot. This random victim would then be put to death, and again the means of doing so seems to have varied, but notably this sometimes meant being beaten to death by the other nine in the group. This of course meant that everyone in the unit was punished, either by being killed or by having to beat a comrade or friend to death. Naturally the fear of this terrible punishment was the main purpose here, and there are very few documented instances of decimation actually being carried out, though we cannot be sure this means it was rarely enacted. When it was done it caused the loss of a large number of potentially experienced soldiers, so was a terrible act of last resort, but it doubtless helped to dissuade any Roman soldier from disobeying orders regardless of his own assessment of the situation he was in.

So with this background to decimation we must first ask what the figures in this set have to do with it, and the answer seems to be nothing. The blurred figure in our image is done to spare you from a very distressing scene, but we have to describe it here, so you have been warned! Essentially this set is a single group of figures. The blurred man is on his knees and being held down by the three men to the left of our image. The man to the right is holding a spear or pole, and is inserting it up the anus of the blurred figure – in short, he is impaling him. It is a horrible thing to witness, and to model, but the Linear-A website claims that this did happen. But did it? We could find absolutely no evidence of decimation being carried out in this way, and to be honest, we are not prepared to conduct the kind of internet search that might reveal more details for fear of what else we might find. So it is a horrific model and a horrific act, and we have grave doubts that it is even authentic.

Where this set seems to have got its inspiration is from an incident during the Battle of Valentia (75 BCE), in the Iberian Peninsula, when a Roman army under the command of Pompey the Great defeated another Roman army controlled by the rebel Quintus Sertorius, who was supporting the Marius faction in what is known to history as the Sertorian War. The city was taken and sacked by Pompey, but in the modern era archaeologists found a single skeleton which suggested a captured Roman had been impaled and then had his legs severed, presumably as some special punishment. The gulf between this single skeleton and the practice of decimation is vast, so don’t take the title of this set literally, but as a depiction of an atrocity carried out around 80-75 BCE, this is perhaps quite reasonable.

Taking a closer look at the figures themselves, all are Roman soldiers dressed in the same manner, but there are some very odd features to their appearance. Firstly, the helmets are all smooth, low crowned and with cheek pieces. The most common helmet of this period was the Montefortino, which usually had a rather higher crown than these, and also usually had a fitting at the top of the crown to take a crest or plume, which these models lack. The shape and lack of a crest fitting would be unusual but not impossible, but the other strange feature is the complete lack of any peak, particularly at the back of the helmet. Such a rear peak would become very pronounced in the later republican and early Imperial periods, but even in the early first century BCE there was a small rear peak, yet there is none here, giving these helmets almost a 20th century appearance (apart from the cheek pieces of course). Basically, we did not like the helmets.

Over their tunic the men all wear a corselet which is completely smooth, which seems to suggest it is made of leather. In the past, many sculptors have attempted to depict mail armour, and most fail, because at this scale mail armour is no more than a rough indistinct texture. Perhaps in this case the sculptor recognised this and left the surface smooth, which is not ideal but at least better than sculpting a few enormous rings! Also of concern is the design of this ‘armour’. It follows the standard basic design of mail, which itself copied the Greek corselet, and includes shoulder doubling pieces. However, while this was always a single piece in a sort of squared ‘U’ shape, fixed at the back and attached to the chest once worn, on all these models the shoulder pieces are two separate strips, looking just the same at the back as the front. We have never seen this arrangement before, and could find no evidence to support it, so must conclude that this is an error by someone who does not understand how this garment worked. Given the poses, the back of the armour is particularly prominent, so this is a really obvious error too.

Rows of pteruges can be seen beneath the armour at both shoulders and waist, and the men wear ordinary Roman shoes on the feet, plus what looks like strips of cloth wrapped round the lower legs (something like the much later puttees). All apart from the victim have their swords hanging from the right of their belt, and their dagger on the left, but naturally none of these are drawn.

Linear-A sculpting for their 3D printed figures like these is always excellent in terms of proportions and general anatomy, and the detail too is very good. The pain experienced by the victim is very obviously visible on his face, so as an exercise in sculpting these figures are all excellent, and of course have no flash or unwanted plastic despite the complex poses that would not be possible with a normal two-piece mould.

So while the technical aspects of the production of this set are top class, there are some very strange features of the helmet and armour given to these men which we are confident are not authentic. However, all that pales into insignificance compared to the horror of the subject depicted here. Why anyone would want such a model is completely beyond us, though we are not here to judge such things. The scene seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the title of the set (presumably they thought giving an accurate title to the set would hurt sales), and while it may well depict one or more incidents that actually happened, it really only serves to remind us of the horrors of war and what one man can do to another when given the chance.