Iranian Office-Holders in the Macedonian Empire (Argeads and Seleucids)

Abstract

Alexander III famously co-opted Persian nobles for the management of his empire, and initiated a policy of intermarriage with the leading families of the former Achaemenid Empire. Alexander’s ‘Iranian policy’ is considered a failure in conventional scholarship. But his principal successors in western Asia, first the early Antigonids and then the Seleukids, successfully continued this policy. Iran and Iranians in fact were of pivotal importance especially to Seleukid rule and military power during the third century BCE. Seleukid decline in the course of the second century BCE allowed local Iranian dynasties to reassert themselves in the peripheries of the Seleukid world. Challenging the modernist interpretation of the so-called ‘Persian Revival’ of the later Hellenistic Period as a form of national resistance to foreign rule, my paper aims to trace the development of Iranian elites between the fall of the Achaemenids and rise of the Arsakids, and their political and cultural significance in the period of Macedonian domination.