The film is divided into nine episodes, following Encolpius (Martin Potter) and his friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) as they try to win the heart of a young boy named Gitón within a surreal and dreamlike Roman landscape.

At the theatre, he discovers Vernacchio and Gitón performing in a lewd play called the "Emperor's Miracle": a slave's hand is axed off and replaced with a gold one.

The elderly poet blames current corruption on the mania for money and invites his young friend to a banquet held at the villa of Trimalchio, a wealthy freeman, and his wife Fortunata.

The next morning Encolpius, Gitón, and Ascyltus are imprisoned on the pirate ship of Lichas, a middle-aged merchant; they are part of a consignment of attractive young men being delivered for the titillation of the reclusive Roman emperor.

Ascyltus placates a nymphomaniac's demands in a covered wagon while Encolpius waits outside, listening to the woman's servant discuss a hermaphrodite demi-god reputed to possess healing powers at the Temple of Ceres.

Captured by soldiers, Encolpius is released in a labyrinth and forced to play Theseus to a gladiator's Minotaur for the amusement of spectators at the festival of Momus, the God of Laughter.

When the gladiator spares Encolpius's life because of his well-spoken words of mercy, the festival rewards the young man with Ariadne, a sensual woman with whom he must copulate as the crowd looks on.

For having rejected his advances and humiliating him, a sorcerer curses a beautiful young woman: she must spend her days kindling fires for the village's hearths from her genitalia.

Greeted by an old woman who has him drink a potion, Encolpius falls under a spell where his sexual prowess is restored to him by Oenothea in the form of an Earth Mother figure and sorceress.

[6] In Comments on Film, Fellini explained that his goal in adapting Petronius's classic was "to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination: to invent everything and then to objectify the fantasy; to get some distance from it in order to explore it as something all of a piece and unknowable.

Other original sequences include a nymphomaniac in a desert caravan whose despondent husband pays Ascyltus and Encolpius to couple with her, and a hermaphrodite worshipped as a demigod at the Temple of Ceres.

Abducted by the two protagonists and a mercenary, the hermaphrodite later dies a miserable death in a desert landscape that, in Fellini's adaptation, is posed as an ill-omened event, none of which is to be found in the Petronian version.

This intentional technique of fragmentation conveys Fellini's view of both the original text and the nature of history itself, and is echoed visually in the film's final shot of a ruined villa whose walls, painted with frescoes of the scenes we have just seen, are crumbling, fading and incomplete.

When Fellini and his producer Alberto Grimaldi started work on their film, Bini contracted Gian Luigi Polidoro to direct his own version.

Co-screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi noted that Fellini used a deliberately jerky form of dubbing that caused the dialogue to appear out of sync with the actors' lips.

[citation needed] First screened at the 30th Venice Film Festival on 4 September 1969, Fellini Satyricon received generally positive reviews by critics writing in "stunned bewilderment".

It is a place outside historical time, an area of the unconscious in which the episodes related by Petronius are relived among the ghosts of Fellini ... His Satyricon is a journey through a fairytale for adults.

It is evident that Fellini, finding in these ancient personages the projection of his own human and artistic doubts, is led to wonder if the universal and eternal condition of man is actually summed up in the frenzied realization of the transience of life which passes like a shadow.

[20] Kezich saw the film as a study in self-analysis, stating, "Everything seems to be aimed at making the viewer feel ill at ease, at giving him the impression that he is watching for the first time scenes from a life he never dreamed could have existed.

The website's critical consensus states: "Episodic and strange, Satyricon offers a hedonistic tour through an ancient Rome that exists not in history books, but from Federico Fellini's singular imagination".

[25] As co-producers keen to recoup their investment, executives at United Artists made certain that Fellini received "a maximum of exposure" during his American promotional tour of the film by organizing press and television interviews in New York and Los Angeles.