Genealogie della maschilità. Generi e desideri nelle "Baccanti" di Euripide

This article focuses on some of the characters of Euripides’ Bacchae using a queer, philologically founded, approach. Our starting hypothesis is that the family relationships between some characters of the tragedy correspond to a symbolic genealogy which connects various episodes of ancient Greek mythology, creating a unique, coherent meaning. Thus, three characters of the tragedy – Actaeon, Pentheus and Dionysus – will be analyzed as different models of masculinity: two of them (Actaeon and Pentheus) are losers, for several reasons, and Dionysus appears to be a winner, but his model of masculinity is absolutely heretical, eccentric, basically not virile and, at last, queer.