Was Cleopatra really beautiful?

What Plutarch actually wrote

The most famous ancient verdict on Cleopatra’s looks is not the one people expect. In his Life of Antony, Plutarch says that her beauty in itself was not beyond comparison, nor the kind that struck people the moment they saw her. What was irresistible was time spent in her company: her conversation, her powers of persuasion, and a character that colored everything she did. Her voice, he adds, was sweet to hear (Antony 27).

Plutarch is not calling her plain. Two chapters earlier he says she trusted in the effect of her beauty, which had worked on Caesar, and that she met Antony at the age when a woman’s looks are most brilliant and her mind at its sharpest (Antony 25). His point is that the face was the least of it. The same passage praises the many languages she spoke, part of her Macedonian Greek story.

What her coins show

Coins are the only portraits we can tie to her for certain, because they carry her name. They show a long, hooked nose, a prominent chin and hair drawn back into a bun under a royal headband. On a Roman silver denarius struck for Antony, her bust carries a Latin legend:

CLEOPATRAE REGINAE REGVM FILIORVM REGVM

“Of Cleopatra, queen of kings and of her sons who are kings.” Antony’s head is on the other side, and the two profiles look strikingly alike, with the same nose and the same jutting chin. Scholars read that as a convention, a royal couple shown in harmony, not a photograph. Her coin face also resembles her father’s. Of the marble heads matched to the coins, the one in Berlin’s Altes Museum keeps its full nose, with the same diadem and bun; the head in the Vatican Museums has lost its nose.

Where the legend of the great beauty comes from

Cassius Dio, writing about two and a half centuries after her death, is the source of the dazzling Cleopatra. He calls her a woman of surpassing beauty, at her most striking in the prime of youth, with a most charming voice, and says she staked her claim to the throne on her looks when she went to Caesar (Roman History 42.34).

Roman propaganda had already made her a seductress. To Octavian’s side she was the foreign queen who bewitched a Roman general. Horace, celebrating her death, calls her fatale monstrum, a deadly portent (Odes 1.37). Shakespeare turned Plutarch’s scene at Tarsus into poetry: the queen sailing up the river Cydnus under purple sails, dressed as Venus, and the tribute “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” Blaise Pascal joked in his Pensées (1670) that had her nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed. Film did the rest, from Theda Bara in 1917 to Elizabeth Taylor in 1963.

Nerve, not a face

What the sources agree on is her nerve. She reached Caesar smuggled into the palace in a bedding sack, a trick Plutarch says first captivated him (Caesar 49). She made Antony come to dine with her at Tarsus, not the other way round. These were political performances by a queen whose kingdom depended on Rome’s strongmen, and they worked. Whether her face was beautiful by our standards, nobody can say.