The Dress of A Roman Soldier

Have to write assorted essays for Latin, The first one is the dress of a roman soldier, they are all written from the perspective of the period magazine, 'Better Rome and Garden'. Enjoy.

When you are assembling your own personal Roman Army Montage (tm), accuracy will be of paramount importance to you, so for your convinience we've provided a short primer on the traditional garb in the Roman Army.
The most common type of soldier in your Roman Army Montage (tm) will of course be the common legionary. Those little floofy hats you see your friendly neigborhood garrison wearing are called galea. For construction, we reccomend a feather glued to a small peice of foil. On the torso, you will want to put on a lorica, or breastplate as its known to our barbarian readers, on top of a simple tunic. Because you will prbably be making quite a few of these, you will want to tend towards cheap materials, get a cheap fabric for the tunic and just cut it into squares, unless you're obsessive, in which case more detailed instructions can be found in the Library of Alexandria. For the lorica, we reccomend more foil, experiment to get the cuts exactly right. Lastly, you will want to make your soldiers some tiny solea, or sandals (barbarians!). We couldn't really find a really effective metod to make these, but we came close by taking a mosaic tile, one of the square ones available in any good marketplace, and splitting them and half (Your tile merchant should be able to do this for you). Then, tie them on using some coarse string.
For accessories, you'll want to make a gladius, a pilum, scutum, and a small basket containing some grain. For the gladus, just wrap some foil on a stick, its that easy. use a similar procedure for the pilum, but remember: the pilum is designed to bend in the center after throwing, so put a slight break in the middle, and only put foil at the end. For the scutum, just fold a sheet of foil around a glass for the curvature, and attach to the hand by means of a small peice of wood through the scutum. With the basket, we can't offer much advice, but we have had some luck by making the baskets out of walnut halves. Separating them proberly is tricky though, so it's definitely a job for the slaves.
One last thing to remember: The centurion is only distinguished only by a galea perpendicular to the soldiers head. Happy crafting!

gladuis=sword, pilium=spear, scutum=shield.

If someone actually makes the diorama described and sends me a photo, I will totally send them something cool. Not sure what yet. Email stuff to bobshush2 at yahoo dot what do you really expect here? org? its dot com.