Facial expressions, hand gestures, etc. were all integral parts of oratory, as important as rhetoric and a key component of an orator's training. Cicero devotes some attention to movement, gestures, and intonation in the de Oratore, and Quintilian has a whole section on it. The dominant styles of oratory in the city, following Cicero, imitated...well, Cicero. Cicero's style leaned more towards the Attic Style, as opposed to the bombastic Asiatic Style, and it was characterized by careful gesture, which Quintilian says should be imitative of life, not excessive. Unlike Hortensius, a contemporary of Cicero's, who used a form of the Asiatic Style, was criticized by Cicero for using too many gestures and making them too affected--Valerius Maximus tells us that the actor Roscius studied Hortensius' gestures and replicated them. By contrast, Cicero's style usually restrained from excessive gesture or intonation, except during passages of extreme importance or emotion--the tricolon crescendos for which Cicero is famous would have been accompanied by rising tone and volume in his speech and more and more dramatic gestures, which is more or less the way a real person acts when getting to a very exciting climax

There is some archaeological evidence for these poses. Adlocutio was a standard pose for showing a person addressing a crowd, as seen on [this] (http://www.vroma.org/images/raia_images/adlocutio_aureus.jpg) coin or on the [Statue of Augustus as Prima Porta] (https://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/farberas/arth/Images/109images/Roman/augustus/augustus_prima.jpg). These are highly stylized, but do show the rather unnatural (by modern standards) positions Romans would have at least associated with oratory. I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere about Italians always speaking with their hands.

Could anyone tell me how historically accurate the show is on the whole? I've been contemplating watching it, but only if it doesn't stray too far from reality.