Coin kills legend of Cleopatra’s looks

LONDON: When Shakespeare wrote that the face of Cleopatra, ancient queen of Egypt, “beggar’d all description”, he meant that words could not sum up her beauty.

But a coin dating from 32 BC and put on display in Britain on Tuesday shows that the phrase had an unintended double meaning: it depicts the queen as no great looker with a shrewish profile, shallow forehead, pointed chin, thin lips, and a hooked nose.

Her lover, Mark Antony, fares little better on the coin’s flip side. The Roman general, who has been made out by poets and philosophers to have been the epitome of manhood, is shown to have bulging eyes, a crooked nose, and a bull neck.

The portraits are a long way from the famously sultry depiction of the couple by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film Cleopatra.

The coin went on display at Newcastle University, northeast England, on Valentine’s Day after lying in a bank for 85 years.

Cleopatra, who also had an affair with Julius Caesar, also inspired Shakespeare to write one of his most famous lines: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety.

But Lindsay Allason-Jones, the university’s director of archaeological museums, said the image of Cleopatra as a great beauty is comparatively modern, dating back to mediæval poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

“Roman writers tell us that Cleopatra was intelligent and charismatic and that she had a seductive voice, but, tellingly, they do not mention her beauty,” she said. “It’s one of those Hollywood myths, by having people like Taylor playing her, and it’s very difficult to get that out of peoples’ psyches.

“She does look as if she’s forgotten to put her teeth in.”

The coin itself represents one three-hundredth of a Roman soldier’s salary and was probably minted to pay the wages of those stationed in Egypt.