In Ancient Greece, the following types of gestures were in use (simplifying an unjustly complicated fivefold classification proposed by D. Lateiner and reducing it into three points): 1) conscious and ritualized gestures; 2) conscious but not ritualized gestures, of individual character; 3) unconscious gestures. In connection with the "rhetoric of gesture", this article deals mainly with gestures of the second category. After citing various examples from political and legal history of Archaic and Classical Athens, the author aims to demonstrate that in the framework of culture of conscious non-ritualized gestures, more restrained gestures were correlated (at least in the sources' perception) with a political position, which was also considered more moderate, and non-restrained gestures - with a radical position.