A silver coin from 32BC that went on display at Newcastle University on Valentine’s Day bears an unflattering image of Antony and Cleopatra. Contrary to popular belief, he had bulging eyes and a hooked nose, and she, as The Sun so pithily put it, was “a minger”.

Cleopatra VII did not look like Elizabeth Taylor. Or rather she did look like Elizabeth Taylor, but as the screen legend is now, rather than as she was when she made eyes at Richard Burton in the 1963 film.

I went to see my colleague Philip Howard, the font of all classical knowledge. “Please Philip, say it ain’t so!” I pleaded. He shook his head sorrowfully and reached for The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilisation, which notes of Cleopatra: “Plutarch reports it was her conversation rather than her looks which formed the secret of her success.”

All the important historical sources I have ever seen have pointed to Cleopatra as one of the great femmes fatales. I remember first coming across her at the age of 8 through the work of the great Goscinny and Uderzo, those unimpeachable authorities on the culture of the ancient world. In Asterix and Cleopatra Albert Uderzo created arguably the sauciest of his female characters; a haughty minx with an hourglass figure poured into shimmering, slinky outfits, a perfect glossy, dark bob and a pointy nose stuck high in the air.

Amanda Barrie in a gold bikini in Carry On Cleo made quite an impression when I was an adolescent. Then at A level I studied Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. In the first scene Antony is called a “strumpet’s fool” and to a 17-year-old the Egyptian queen was immediately intriguing. I was in lust with the last of the Ptolemies.

I saw Judi Dench play her at the National Theatre 20 years ago. It is true — and I hope this doesn’t sound ungallant — that Judi Dench was not, even then, a classic babe. But she was Judi Dench. And that meant that on stage she was Cleopatra at her most alluring, utterly convincing as she bewitched Anthony Hopkins’s Antony. Seeing Dench’s Cleopatra did not for a moment diminish one’s belief that should Richard Branson ever come up with an even half-decent time machine it would be worth risking if there was a serious chance of jumping into a bath of ass’s milk with Cleo.

Cleopatra must have been, until this week, on everyone’s list of the greatest hotties, not just of antiquity but of all time. Now I’m reexamining all the names on the list starting with Helen of Troy. Some might dispute her place in the pantheon of ancient world pin-ups, on the ground that she is mythical. But if you spent as much of your formal education hunched over the Iliad as I did, Helen of Troy is real. The old men looking down from the gates of Troy, who have seen their sons fighting the Greeks for ten years, wish she would just go home but cannot deny that “her face is wonderfully like the goddesses to look at”. I haven’t seen the Brad Pitt movie Troy but from the stills Diane Kruger, who played Helen, was exactly right: blonde mane, high cheek-bones, smoking, aristocratic, knows-she’s-hot looks.

But what if Helen’s beauty was just Homer’s poetic licence? Perhaps it wasn’t her pulchritude that reeled men in but her terrific line in filthy jokes, an unparalleled ability to feign interest in interminable chariot-racing stories and her knowledge of a couple of eye-popping bedroom tricks involving an amphora of olive oil and a javelin?

Once you start wondering about the authenticity of the looks of one top historical chick it’s hard to stop worrying about the rest. I’ve always had a bit of a thing about that flame-haired tempestuous temptress, Boudicca. All that unbridled Ancient Briton passion. I bet she’d have shown a guy how to party, and there’d have been the added frisson of knowing that if you said the wrong thing you’d end up on one of her gibbets. But what if the wild warrior queen thing was dreamt up by the Iceni propaganda machine to make the Romans look silly for having their asses whipped by a bird? And that really she was a mousy agoraphobic who ran the Roman Woad Tie-and-dye T-shirt Shop and never left Norfolk in her entire life?

Anne Boleyn always struck me as a fun gal, despite the extra finger. Natalie Portman is playing her in an upcoming film. But now I can’t stop thinking about the stories of her third nipple and hideous warts.

I realise looks aren’t everything, but when you’re talking about historical figures it’s a shame to let reality spoil the fantasy. Now, I just know you’re going to tell me that Elizabeth I didn’t look anything like Cate Blanchett.

Times Recommends

• We need bankers more than they need us
• Rooms need a view. Hoteliers don’t
• Wootton Bassett, outpost of lost England