For me, "Fellini Satyricon" is his most remarkable film, even if not his greatest and certainly not his most popular. No film about the Roman world has conveyed so graphically what must have been the actual, enormous strangeness of classical times. It's a disturbing film, both a picaresque sex comedy and a nightmare of everyday superstition and casual violence.

In comparison, the most famous works of cinema about ancient Rome -- Ben-Hur, Spartacus, I Claudius, and so forth -- are laughably sanitized and similar to our own world, which is the common failing of most historical drama of course. Fellini ditched the convention by, among other things, staying extremely faithful to the original source. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter is a jolting and bizarre read. A lot of the humor and wordplay, I'm told, is lost in translation.