Cleopatra - or Cleopatra VII, to be exact, last of the Ptolemaic dynasty to reign in Egypt - was a Greek, coming from a family of intermarrying Greeks who took over the Egyptian kingdoms following the death of Alexander the Great. As with the Hanoverians when they came to England, they maintained something of a ghetto mentality through successive generations. It is said that Cleopatra was the first reigning Ptolemy to learn to speak Egyptian. Had the family gone native sooner, things might conceivably have turned out differently. As it was, by then Greeks were subject to Roman domination and Cleopatra's spirited dalliances with hunky powerful Romans were only ever going to end one way: defeat, death, disgrace.
The Greekness of Cleo is important, particularly when it comes to the REALLY crucial question: what did she look like, then? Raving beauty or fat, beaky-nosed witch? Just where does she register on a scale which has Helen of Troy at one end, and Medusa at the other? The British Museum's new exhibition "Cleopatra of Egypt" comes to no firm conclusion about this, though it provides endless clues. Some of these are in the form of statues and busts of her family - a handful of which are now thought to be of her, though nobody can say for sure. Others are found on the coins minted during her reign, which took her from the age of 17 to her suicide aged 38 in 30BC.
There is no definitive image - some are conventionally beautiful, others verging on ugly, though everyone seems to agree that she and all the female members of her inbred family had rolls of fat around their necks delicately referred to as "Venus rings", and had splendid, prominent noses. The convention among the sculptors of statues was to give the Ptolemy women imposing - all right, fat - heads, accentuated by those wonderful royal wigs. They are generally depicted as full-breasted, slim-hipped. Cleopatra (if it is really she) wears the kind of clingy diaphanous sheath dresses - very different from the looser Roman or classical Greek garb - which makes you wonder if the ancient Egyptians had invented bias-cutting, or even Lycra, as well as everything else. Other images, particularly on the coins where the profiles of the empress tend to omit the wig, are much more commonplace. She may be officially a goddess but she's also an ordinary woman, large of eye and nose, with her braided hair drawn back in a bun.
