A 2,000-year-old Roman coin bearing the images of Egyptian queen Cleopatra and Marc Antony shows that history’s famous lovers didn’t exactly embody their Hollywood image of glamorous beauty.
In real life, Antony and Cleopatra actually looked less like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – and a lot more like Fred and Ethel.
Even before Hollywood, the popular image of many historical celebrities have been defined by mass media docudrama.
Christopher Columbus, for example, did not set out to prove that the world was round. Aristotle made that point two thousand years earlier, and by then almost all educated people took this as fact.
Even so, many generations of school kids have heard the story of how Columbus sailed the ocean blue despite the Spanish scholars who said his little boats would fall off the edge of the earth.
But it is just a story. What made it conventional wisdom was that it was concocted in 1828 by Washington Irving, the popular author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” whose history of Christopher Columbus became a huge best-seller. Many states made the book required reading in all of their schools.
And as often happens, the rest is almost history.
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BBC News | Coin shows Cleopatra's ugly truth
Washington Irving | A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
