Amimetobiou, the One «of the Inimitable Life»: Cleopatra as a Metaphor for Alexandria in Plutarch

Abstract

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.