Will Ocatavian 2.0 finally appear this episode? And would Attia or Servilla actually have been able to “go to court”? Wouldn’t they each have needed a male guardian? Servillia’s would be Brutus I guess, who is Octavian Attia’s?
Not a bad episode. Needed more female nudity, but then what doesn’t? Took me a second to get the new Octavian, but they did a good job of introducing him. About time Timon grew a pair as well.
That was a great episode.
If I were Atia, I might consider opening my veins right now. Timon letting Servilia go was effectively signing Atia’s death warrant-- and probably a pretty nasty death at that.
Vorenus – he’s just a big softy, isn’t he?
What Atia said about a confession not being legal without torture – has that come up before on the show? It’s familiar. Maybe it was in something I’ve read recently.
I’m not happy with the recasting of Octavian. If they couldn’t make Max Pirkis age believably, then they should have youth-anized this new guy and started with him.
Something about Octavian 2.0 seems a lot less confident than his prior version. Perhaps that’s just because he hasn’t lead a giant army before.
We still don’t know what Timon’s pious brother is up to. That guy’s beginning to weird me out.
Probably answered in a previous thread, but…
What are the hand gestures the Herald uses? Are they codified somewhere? Also, who’s the actor?
The actor playing the newsreader is Ian McNeice, but I don’t know what the gestures mean.
I think they might be. In the Victorian age, there was a revival of “classical” speeches as entertainment pieces at parties. There were several published guide books to instruct people on the proper gesticulating, but I don’t know how accurate those guides really were as to how things were done in the Roman times.
I’m still awaiting the greatest catfight of ancient times between Atia and Servilia.
What about the song that the poisoned slave sang? Is there any authentic Roman music around? Did they have any form of musical notation that we have translated?
I wanted to add something. As I understand, the gestures were not done for dramatic effect as much as they were a sort of sign language so that people in the back could get a good idea of what he was saying even if they didn’t catch every word.
That’s what I meant about them being codified.
I thought about that too. But it went something like, “Wow, perhaps the toruture was a mistake - now Servilia is really going to have a vendetta against Atia. Oh wait, she already tried to kill her, so maybe it would be hard to worsen that situation.” But I guess instead of merely killing her, now Servilia might try to have her raped (by baboons perhaps?), tortured, and maybe finish up with cutting off her face, rather than just poisoning her.
There is an advantage in being a historian. We already know what happens. 
The only real problem the wife and I had with this episode was the effect of the poison on the slave. She really should have had a much worse reaction to it all.
I’m not sure about the new Octavian yet, but I thought he did a good job of imitating the awkward mannerisms that Max Pirkis had been using.
The scenes with Timon and his brother are getting tedious. They need to get on with whatever that’s leading to.
I loved Mark Antony’s reaction to Vorenus asking permission to “desert”.
The more this series progresses, the more I realize it’s really all about Pullo.
Sorry. I thought you meant, “Are there any extant books which explain the meaning of various gestures.” My mistake.
Okay, so I recognized Octavian v2.0 and Agrippa. Who was that other snotty ass in the tent there giving Octavian lip?
Probably Maecenas, the third in the famous threesome.
I thought it was a pretty good episode, but not as good as last week. I never thought the first Octavian looked very young at all. When we learned he was 16 or so, I was flabbergasted. He looked in his 20s to me. But then, I’m a terrible judge of that sort of thing.
Even though she just had a finger-full of the food? And there are plenty of poisons that act fairly slowly, which, if you’re going to poison a dish and kill a powerful person, are not bad choices, survival-wise.