She was so beautiful that Antony abandoned his navy to be with her. She also ruled Egypt and spoke nine languages, but that was as nothing next to the fire in her eyes, the radiance of her skin, the heartstopping clarity of her own desire.

Oh, Cleo! Ageless siren! Melter of titans! Joe Cocker would have recognised your power. Shakespeare certainly did. And Joseph L. Mankiewicz. That is why he cast Elizabeth Taylor in her bedazzling prime as his Cleopatra. There may have been some revisionism in his choice, but beauty has always been in the eye of the director, and the great director’s eye always reflects, to some degree, that of his audience. To each age its vision of beauty.

And its spoilsports. The Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne has released from a bank vault, on this day of all days, in this week of all fashion weeks, a long-forgotten Roman coin depicting Cleopatra in deeply unflattering caricature. Such crushing euphemisms as “plain” and “homely” fail utterly to capture her unattractiveness. Her neck recalls the heyday of East German weightlifting. Her spike of a nose points earthwards like some roughhewn geophysical probe. Her chin juts out to meet it like a piece of angle iron. This is gratuitous reverse revisionism by the Romans, never mind the Tynesiders.

’Twas ever easy to traduce a legend in vulgar coinage, then bury it and trust gleeful fossickers millennia hence to dig it up and mock the dead when they have lost the power to enrapture. Well, we shall not fall for it. We hold this truth to be self-evident: Cleopatra still has that power, for she was not just beautiful. She defined beauty. And those who hold otherwise can kiss her asp.