At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a critically aware reader approaching Petronius' Satyricon for the first time might well feel as if she is queuing to see an overhyped film, the kind of provocative Hollywood flick designed to bait media and consumers alike with wild expectations, reactions and predefinitions. Critics have claimed repeatedly that the Satyricon is ‘singularly uninterpretable’, that it ‘presents more puzzles than any other ancient text’ or that it stands as ‘the most controversial text in all of classical literature’, an exotic ‘hothouse plant displaying all the qualities of overstimulated growth’. And although it is generally safe to say that we have moved on from times when ‘the scabrous nature of some of the episodes made a scholarly interest in the work eccentric or suspect’, the sexual ‘shock factor’ is undeniably part and parcel of the way we (are taught to) read the Satyricon, and remains an important facet of its ‘enigma’ as well as of its appeal. We cannot study Petronius without at some point coming across Fellini's whorish adaptation and Polidoro's soft porn, or hearing about the cryptic 1960s publication entitled New York expurgated: A moral guide for the jaded, tired, evil, non-conforming, corrupt, condemned and the curious – humans and otherwise – to underground Manhattan (Grove Press, New York, 1966), penned by (who else?) ‘Petronius’.