“According to the ancient biographer Plutarch, men were hypnotized not by Cleopatra’s looks but by her wit and charm: Her beauty was ‘not of the incomparable kind that would astonish everyone who saw her,’ he wrote, ‘but her conversation was irresistibly fascinating, and her character utterly mesmerizing’. … Cleopatra’s profile on many surviving coins, which were minted in Egypt during her lifetime, is downright ugly.”