By any standards Cleopatra VII, the “Father-Loving Goddess”, last ruling pharaoh of Egypt, was one of the most extraordinary women who has ever lived. To her contemporaries, in fact, she was literally otherworldly. Ordinary Egyptians worshipped her as a goddess, the final incarnation of a tradition that stretched back, via her ancestor Ptolemy I and his childhood friend Alexander the Great, to the first pharaohs. But to her Roman adversaries she was a devil, a wanton witch-queen, the embodiment of eastern corruption. Even her final moments, as she lay gasping for breath, supposedly after a bite from an Egyptian cobra in her palace in Alexandria, had a flavour of the forbidden, the exotic, the supernatural.
As the American critic Francine Prose is keen to point
