“History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead,” said Voltaire.

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The luscious Welsh beauty Catherine Zeta-Jones and Australia’s juiciest slab of meat, Hugh Jackman, are readying themselves to play an eyebrow-raising “trick” upon several dead figures of history.

We do mean the fabled, ambitious Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, and her dissolute Roman conquest and second husband, Mark Anthony. 

Zeta-Jones has been asked to play Cleo in a “rock n’roll” version of the queen’s story. Jackman would be Anthony, undone by his passion and his love of a good time. 

History and movie fans know that Cleopatra’s first husband, Julius Caesar, met an untimely end inside Rome’s senate, stabbed by good friends who didn’t want him to become Emperor. They thought this was a noble deed, but Rome went on to deconstruct the Republic anyway and suffer maniacs like Octavian, Nero and Caligula. (They just couldn’t read the cow entrails properly, I guess!)

There have been three famous onscreen Cleos. Claudette Colbert, the sexiest and most modern, in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 epic … Vivien Leigh, an exquisite minx in the 1945 screen version of George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” … and but of course, Elizabeth Taylor in the infamous 1963 production that took three years to complete, and all but ruined 20th Century Fox. The Joe Mankiewicz movie was not the financial bomb of legend — in fact it was a huge hit. But it simply cost so much that in 1963 there was no way the studio could recoup. (Miss Taylor, who had a piece of the profits pie, made about seven million, and also won herself a fifth and sixth husband — Richard Burton. She saw it as a win-win situation.)

The Zeta-Jones/Jackman film will be enlivened with music written by the indie rock band Guided by Voices. Steven Soderbergh, who put Catherine through her paces in “Traffic,” is to direct. 

Sounds rather wacky to me, but Catherine hasn’t been in a musical since her Oscar-winning turn in “Chicago” and Jackman has displayed his singing/dancing chops only on Broadway, in “The Boy From Oz.” So, why not?

Also, Catherine’s hubby, Michael Douglas, is supposed to begin filming “Liberace” soon. Given that both Cleo and Libby had a flair for fashion overstatement, maybe Mr. and Mrs. Douglas can share costumes? It’s the movies — you can suspend disbelief!

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The new James Bond thriller, “Quantum of Solace,” opens today in London and premieres in the U.S. on November 14. If it even comes near the gross on “Casino Royale” it will be a smash. (But of course, the producers want “Quantum” to double and triple that; in showbiz you’ve got to keep topping yourself. There’s no, “Whew, I’ve made it, I can relax!”)

And what of Daniel Craig, the rugged blonde actor who everybody said was too rugged and too blonde to be a believable 007? Well, of course he was/is terrific. Many critics venture to say he is more convincing than Sean Connery, the original stud with a license to kill.

And it seems the readers of In Touch magazine agree. The editors polled their readers, asking who was the hottest Bond — Craig got an enthusiastic 57-percent nod … Pierce Brosnan was way down at 23 percent … and the icon himself, Sean, a piddling 20 percent. 

I have to wonder if these results are the result of familiarity, publicity and the young demographic of In Touch readers? Also, the magazine left out the divine Roger Moore, who made seven Bond movies! 

Not to mention Timothy Dalton, and the unfairly trashed George Lazenby, who played Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Then Sean Connery came back, thicker and slower, but still appealing enough to make his final Bond movies very successful.