Though Cleopatra was born—and apparently thought of herself as—a Macedonia Greek, all that mattered to her Roman contemporaries was that she was not a Roman and, more important, that her existence, her influence, and her power constituted an obstacle to Roman expansion. She was a force to be destroyed or encouraged to destroy herself so that the empire could prevail. Her gender, her exoticized "Easternness," and her determination to protect her country's autonomy helped explain why Egypt was thought to need the moral, political and practical guidance of Rome—and why Cleopatra did in fact need the support and allegiance of Mark Antony and Julius Caesar. It is hard not to notice how profoundly her gender determined the way in which her story has been told. Despite the evidence of her achievements—the kingdom she ruled, the city she helped build, the seeming ease with which she navigated between the two worlds of Rome and Egypt—she is generally better known for seducing, managing, and manipulating her Roman lovers, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. The Romans were the first of many to depict Cleopatra as a cruel Asiatic queen, all greedy ambition and no moral conscience. Alexandre Cabanel's 1887 orientalist painting, Cleopatra Testing Poisons on Condemned Prisoners, shows the queen lounging on her sofa as prisoners—guinea pigs for her testing of deadly toxins—die in agony around her. The story of a woman who recklessly destroys men, or who is responsible for our eternal exile from the Garden of Eden, or who incites a ruthless murder or a catastrophic war has never gone out of fashion.

Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth by Francine Prose, from the Yale University Press Ancient Lives series