2023-12-07 12:30:10
At first glance, this book smells like a somewhat specialized zoology treatise supposed to tell us the story of a fish, the remora, belonging to the echeneidae family. A hitchhiker of the seas, who attaches himself to the bellies of sharks in particular, he is surrounded by an almost mythical halo which has made him appear in literature both in Rabelais and in the saga Harry Potter.
But appearances are deceptive because this essay can also be read as a detective novel about a cold case dating back to Antiquity, which bounced back multiple times over the next two millennia without finding a solution.
The crime ? A crushing defeat during the naval battle of Actium in 31 BCE, off the coast of Greece, which pitted Octavian – the future Emperor Augustus – against Marc Antony, allied with Cleopatra, for the head of the Roman Empire. The suspect ? A fish, the remora, which, stuck to the hulls of Marc Antony’s boats, would have slowed them down, preventing them from destroying the opposing fleet by ramming. The investigator? A professor of Latin literature, philologist, professor at the University of Poitiers, associated with physicists.
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Let’s admit it from the outset, there will only be one volume of this story and at the end the reader will have the answer to the classic questions for such a genre: is the remora guilty? If he isn’t, who is? And who benefits from the crime?
A legend that grows, distorts, gets carried away
As a bonus, the reader will discover many exciting facets of this adventure. There are, of course, methods of investigation, which have nothing to envy of DNA fingerprints, with the monitoring of Greek and Latin words, transcription errors, changes in meaning. There are “spinning stations” in the middle of the libraries to identify the “accomplices”, sometimes poets, then religious people, magicians (but not alchemists!), before the obligatory naturalists who spread the accusations. There is also the impressive final reconstruction that settles the case. There is no shortage of twists and turns.
And then, above all, there is the big story in the small one. Because the investigation into the remora merges with the history of science, allowing us to revisit the episodes leading to the birth of the scientific method, the result of a difficult birth. The animal, before being a suspect, is also the witness to the epistemological changes which will lead to authors finally experimenting, observing, and above all criticizing the Ancients. All that is missing are illustrations to follow the metamorphoses of the accused.
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