Late Roman skirmishing bowmen - Sagittarii Venatores, Auxilium Palatinum

This is definitely my last unit of old 1980s figures: a dozen auxiliary archers, based as skirmishers.

The archers are Minifigs, a mix of Z22 and Z23 and the draconarius is from Gladiator. It would have been nice to have more variety of pose in the archers but the Asgard archers don't match in very well so I went with just mixing the two Minifigs variants and filing the crests off some of the helmets.

Given that the figures only have tiny round shields, I wasn't going to bother with a historic shield pattern or assign a name to them but whilst browsing through Luke Ueda-Sarson's excellent website of Notitia Dignitatum shield designs, I saw that there were a number of Auxilia Palatina titled as Sagittarii, suggesting that they were archers or at least had some special association or excellence in that field. Unfortunately, the shield designs all looked a nightmare to paint, especially on such a small canvas. 

Happily all was not lost. Luke had identified a discrepancy in the document, suggesting some shields were mis-attributed. In particular, the rather complicated design for the Sagittarii Venatores was wrong and perhaps the shield attributed to the Sequani was the correct one. Whilst he makes a good case for this conclusion, the point that convinced me most was that the shield attributed to the Sequani was a lot simpler and would look OK on these tiny round shields: Sagittarii Venatores it must be!

As mentioned above, this is my last full unit of old Minifigs, Asgard and Gladiator Miniatures infantry figures. On to the cavalry now.

As mentioned in my first post on this Roman army, I originally misattributed the Gladiator Miniatures command figures as Museum Miniatures - I've gone through all the posts and corrected that now, I hope catching all such instances. My apologies for any confusion caused by this.