After Alexander's death in 323 BC, his generals divided the empire and for more than thirty years fought one another for a larger portion of Alexander's heritage. One of these warlords was Seleucus, who on Alexander's order had married Apame. The Seleucid dynasty sprang from the Macedonian-Iranian union. This chapter focuses political organization, financial organization and the internal structure of Seleucid Iran. Alexander and the Seleucids preserved the Persian division of the empire into enormous satrapies. As the Seleucid standard was identical with the Attic standard which was followed in the greater part of the Hellenistic world, the trade from the Indian Ocean to the Adriatic Sea was based on the same monetary system. Greek settlers in Iran wanted to remain Greeks. Alexander's colonists demanded 'A Greek education and a Greek way of life' in Iran and after Alexander's death some of them began to return home, since they felt deprived of Greek civilization.

The appearance of the Persian goddess Anāhitā in Asia Minor represents part of a change taking place throughout the dominions of the Achaemenians, not the introduction of something traditionally Iranian into new territories. The Anāhitā cult probably represents a fundamental change in Iranian religion. One cannot speak about the Iranians in Asia Minor without speaking about the Greeks, which is without understanding what Greeks and Persians had in common, for they were enemies who respected each other. The Greeks were fascinated and astonished by the outlandish grandeur of the Persians, with its successes and failures, but they also sensed in it a pathetic quality and saw its extraordinary tendency to entangle all but the best of the Persians in illusion and self destruction. Until the fall of the Persian monarchy, the Iranian presence had probably been as intense in Asia Minor west of the Halys as it had been in P.