As we turned back for home, we walked by an absolutely enormous Emporium that made the central warehouse in Rome look like a collection of cabbage stalls. Also beside the waterfront we found Cleopatra’s Caesarium. This monument to Julius Caesar, at the time still unfinished, had become the place of refuge where the Queen hauled up the wounded Mark Antony to die in her arms after he tried to kill himself in his own refuge, another impressive monument by the harbour which was called the Timonium. Then the Caesarium was the scene of her own suicide as Cleopatra pipped the gloating Octavian’s hopes of flaunting her in his ceremonial Triumph. For that alone I liked the girl. Unfortunately Octavian turned the Caesarium into a shrine to his own dreadful family, which spoiled it. It was guarded by enormous old red granite obelisks, which we were told he had brought from elsewhere in Egypt. That was one advantage of this province. Exotic outdoor ornaments littered the place. Had these obelisks not been such dead weights, Augustus would undoubtedly have shipped them off to Rome. They were begging to be used in trendy landscape gardening.

We gazed at the Caesarium, and felt the pang of standing next to history. (Trust me; it is extremely similar to the pang of badly wanting a sit-down and a drink of cold water.) We found a giant sphinx against whose lion paw we could lean weakly until guards chased us off. Helena was at pains to assure me that Cleopatra’s mystique had derived not from beauty but from wit, vivacity and vast intellectual knowledge.

‘Don’t disappoint me. We men imagine she bounced about on scented satin pillows, wildly uninhibited.’

‘Oh Roman generals like to think they have seduced a clever woman. Then they can fool themselves they have done it for her own good,’ Helena mocked.

‘Anything less frigid than the average general’s wife would have seemed hot stuff to Caesar and Antony. An hour of Cleo throwing her sceptre at the ceiling and doing erotic back-somersaults would pass pretty pleasantly.’