Who was the Egyptian queen who allied with Julius Caesar?

Cleopatra VII, and almost nothing in the popular image survives contact with the record. She was Macedonian Greek, descended from one of Alexander's generals, and ruled a Greek dynasty that had held Egypt for nearly three hundred years - she was reportedly the first of the line who bothered to learn Egyptian. She is also closer in time to us than to the building of the Great Pyramid.

Her reputation as a seductress is largely Roman propaganda, manufactured by Octavian, who needed the war against Antony to look like a defence of Rome against a foreign woman rather than a civil war against a Roman general. Contemporary sources credit her with fluency in many languages, a serious grasp of finance and administration, and a navy - Plutarch says her beauty was not in itself remarkable and that the effect was her presence and her conversation.

The asp is doubtful too. Suicide is well attested, the method is not; ancient sources already disagreed, an Egyptian cobra is large and awkward to conceal, and its bite is unreliable as a way to die quickly. Poison is at least as likely. What is certain is that her death ended both the Ptolemaic dynasty and Egyptian independence, which did not return for nearly two thousand years.