In Life of Antony, Plutarch builds one of the most relevant portraits of
Cleopatra VII. However, Plutarch is far from being impartial, as one would expect in a
«Historian». Quite the opposite. Plutarch defines the last Lagid Queen as an Alexandrian
metaphor. At the same time, she represents the perception that the Greco-Roman mentality
in the first centuries of our Era had of the Egyptian city: luxurious, lustful, lazy, exotic,
exuberant, deceitful and tricky, as well as sapient.