She elicited scorn and envy in equal and equally distorting measure; her story is constructed as much of male fear as fantasy. From Plutarch descends history’s greatest love story, though Cleopatra’s life was neither as lurid nor as romantic as has been made out. And she became a femme fatale twice over. For Actium to be the battle to beat all battles, she had to be the “wild queen” plotting Rome’s destruction. For Antony to have succumbed to something other than a fellow Roman, Cleopatra had to be a disarming seductress “who had already ruined him and would make his ruin still more complete.”
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