La guerra sucia de Alejandro: las guerrillas bactrio-sogdianas

The campaign of Alexander’s Macedonian Army in the regions of Bactria and Sogdiana has received increased attention by the scholars in recent years, with several papers about the topic, probably due to the recent years’ war in Afghanistan. The usual approach of the historiographical vision of the fight between Alexander and the people in Bacrtia and Sodgiana sets out the locals as rebels, and their resistance to Alexander as a war of guerrilla tactics’ war, which supposedly put in check the Macedonians. However, the information in our sources allows us a very different interpretation, clearly showing that the Macedonian management of the region was based in a hard repression and violence by the Macedonian occupation army. Starting from a detailed analysis of the different episodes, and the way the sources of Alexander account what happened, we try to observe in deep both the order of the events and their authentic dimension, in order to show an interpretation as closer as can be to the facts, that allows us to adequate our perception of this conflict to what we know about the mechanisms of the Macedonian imperialism. In this detailed approach, likewise, we will focus our attention in the character of Spitamenes, usually considered as the most skilful and dangerous rival of Alexander, as far as in the sieges during the campaign and, especially, in the battle of the Politimetus river, the main defeat suffered by the armies of Alexander during the whole campaign in Asia, in order to show the elements in common among the many different episodes of the war in Bactria and Sogdiana and note possible generic policies and specific answers in the submission of the landscape.