Our cultural image repertoire has remembered Cleopatra as a transitional figure, suspended between a living embodiment of quasi-divine political power and the reanimation of a mythic signifier. In the historical chronicles of the ancient world, her demise marks the end of a political dynasty that served to consolidate the hegemony of Roman rule. Significantly, the image most readily associated with this last Egyptian pharaoh is that of her beautiful corpse, either exposed as a naked body with a snake at her breast or placed on public display in full funeral regalia. Over her dead body, the Roman ruler, Octavius, came to celebrate the triumph of his political ideology by erecting a monument to precisely the embodiment of the foreign but fascinating culture of the East, which he had finally successfully vanquished. Indeed, it is important to remember that we know very little about the actual historical Cleopatra, have little factual evidence of what she looked like. Instead, most research on her cultural afterlife draws attention to the way she functions as an enigmatic ruler, to whom we have access only through a long tradition of posthumous representations that divest Cleopatra of historical specificity so as to have her signify the tragic death of a fated political seductress. For this reason, it is also important to recall that her cultural survival has its beginnings in Octavius’ propaganda, whose purpose was to salvage the name of his countryman, Antony. Having successfully brought about the downfall of his rival, Octavius needed the Egyptian queen to take the full blame for the defection of the warrior with whom he had initially ruled Rome.