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Seleuces was the Macedonian general whom Alexander the Great left in charge of conquered Persia (largely what’s now Iran) in the 330s BC. The Achaeminid Empire, also called the Old Persian Empire, had been immensely powerful at its height, around 480 BC. It was in decline by the time Alexander added it to his collection of kingdoms. Still, there was precedent for imperial government in Persia, and Seleuces took advantage of it by bringing Persian officers and Persian regional officials into his government of Macedonians and Greeks and by using his troops to keep order. He successfully dropped the vice and transformed himself into a full-on roy (king).

Seleuces’ descendants, the Seleucid Dynasty, ruled a piece of Asia that stretched from Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) to Afghanistan. Seleucid rule lasted until a powerful regional rival, the Parthians, conquered Persia in the second century BC.

The rise of the Parthians traces back to 250 BC, when the leader Arsaces, from central Asia, founded Parthia in eastern Persia. His descendant, Mithradates I, went on an empire-building campaign of his own from about 160–140 BC, assembling lands from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and eastward into India.

Mithradates’ goal was to re-create the Achaeminid Empire of more than 300 years earlier. Alexander and his successors had displaced Persian culture with Greek — a change called Hellenization because the Greeks called themselves Hellenes. Mithradates reversed Hellenization and revived all things Persian. The Parthian Empire lasted until 224 AD, when a soldier called Ardashir, a member of a noble Persian family called Sassanid, rebelled against the king and killed him. Like the Parthians, the Sassanid Dynasty was Rome’s major rival in the East, lasting until the Muslim Arabs conquered Persia in about 642. (For more about the Arabs, turn to Chapter 6.)