This has pederasty, paedophilia, voyeurism and impotence and is really quite brilliant. The beginning and end have been lost over the last 2000 years and the remaining text is fragmentary but it's well worth a read, if only to be left with that pleasing sensation of wanting more. The scene where the Priestess of Priapus is about to take a whalebone dildo to the hero is sadly truncated. Highly recommended. ( )

As an adolescent I was fascinated to the point of obsession with films and took out every book on the cinema our local library possesed. The pictures from Fellini's Satyricon [Film Yearbook for 1969] intigued me and my pre-teen senses were inflamed by the beauty of the youths playing Encolpius, Gitone and Ascilto and titilated by the implied perversity of their roles.

To my surprise we had a copy of the Satyricon on the shelves at home and I determined to read it. I don't know when it was published but it was back in the days when any hint of sexual activity was renederd in Latin and only the fairly dull - well, dull depending on what you're looking for - were in English.

I read a complete translation a few years later, although at that stage having studied Latin for five years I might have had better luck making out the original, and was disappointed by the fragmentary and choatic nature of the novel. At school and later at university we studied dinner at Trimalchios and it still resonates in my mind as an excellent and enirely unsettling depiction of disorganised and excessive consumption.

I'm usually the first to urge people to read the book before and after seeing the film: here I must admit Fellini's Satyricon was excellent, a visual and sensual triumph, and somewhat of an improvement on the text. ( )