Susan Walker, curator of the British Museum in 2001 said that the typical image of Cleopatra portrayed by history and Hollywood is...
"Myth and most probably nonesense."
The claim came after new evidence of eleven new portrayals of the queen from the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose, California. One, a full length, basalt statue shows her to of been a short, sturdy woman with bands of fat around her neck. This does co-inside with the dynasty she was born into, the Ptolemy dynasty, who were known to lose their shape. Egyptologists estimated the average height of a female aristocrat of that age to be around five feet. Dr Nigel Strudwick, of the Egyptian Department of the British Museum said...
"One of the things the current exhibition is trying to do is re-examine the image Cleopatra has been given through history...exaggerated her beauty as a sort of propaganda tool to suggest that she must have used feminine wiles to entrap powerful Roman men."
Two of the most famous romans she seduced were of course Julius Caeser and Mark Antony. She and Caeser had a son and he was so taken with her he placed a statue of gold of her in the temple of Venus.