Books: In Man’s Image

LIVES OF WIVES—Laura Riding—Random House ($2.50).

“All women would like things to happen swiftly and largely—but, the things they would have happen being so different from the things likely to happen, most of them prefer slow, small lives to naked contact with the insufficiencies that their times and their husbands represent.” Thus expatriate Poet Laura Riding compresses the theme of Lives of Wives, and invites readers to take another good look at history.

A collection of three historical novelettes, Lives of Wives draws its characters from three pre-Christian periods, the times 1) of Cyrus and Croesus, 2) of Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great and Aristotle, 3) of Caesar, Antony and Herod the Great. But these famed figures “are here written of as husbands rather than as heroes.” Told in an exact, classical prose, and simply condensing a vast amount of fact, Lives of Wives keeps a shrewd, wifely eye on these celebrated husbands, dissects what was the matter with their wives.

The most dramatic portrait is that of Olympias, wife of lusty, roughneck Philip II, mother of psychopathic Alexander the Great. Her sinister and violent career has always given historians the creeps. But no historian has shown so shrewd an insight into her character as Laura Riding. She poses a daring speculation: Was Olympias perhaps a noble woman embittered and corrupted by her coarsely disappointing husband? Likewise the career of Cleopatra becomes a seductive peg on which to hang the thesis that women are pretty much what men make them.

Two good wives grace those turbulent and dangerous times. One was Mariamne, sweet-tempered Jewish wife of Herod, who loved her desperately even though he let her be executed as a result of Salome’s cold-blooded intrigues. The other was Amytis, wife of handsome, witty, tolerant Cyrus.

“Amytis’ gift of curiosity,” says Author Riding, “is one thing to remember about her; and her placidity of temper is another. . . . Their combination made her a sensible woman.” But particularly the thing to remember about her, implies Author Riding, is that she was a good woman because Cyrus was a good husband.