Of course. The most well known example of an empire larger than the Roman empire at its height is the Mongolian empire. And there are several other empires, even if we don’t count large countries that aren’t technically empires.

So, it’s not the size that maters. Perhaps it matters how ancient the empire was, one may think. But there were large empires before the Roman empire, like Alexander the Great’s Greek empire and obviously the Achamenid Persian empire before him. However, Achamenid Persia was conquered about 2 centuries from its establishment and Alexander’s empire got fragmented much faster, its parts, the kingdoms of the Diadochi, also getting eliminated within 2–3 centuries.

The modern states also didn’t last that long and they aren’t empires. So from a quick look we can argue that the long duration of the Roman empire was something that sets Romes conquests apart from others. In fact if we start with the Roman conquests during the Republic era, we get a bonus of 3 centuries and then the empire survived pretty much as a whole for 4 centuries and then its eastern part, including the capital, the New Rome, also known as Constantinople, laster for another 1000 years.

Scipio was defeating Hannibal in the 3rd century BC and Constantine XI made his last stand in the 15th century AD. Imagine the legendary status USA as an unconquered empire would have a thousand years in the future. So, I’d say size does matter but also duration is very important.

Also, performance is crucial. It’s not just how big it is and how long it lasts. It should leave its mark in history. The Roman empire was for many states the blueprint of how a state should be, concerning laws, economy, military, art etc. For centuries its culture was believed to have been the pinnacle of humanity. In fact they didn’t even know that Roman art was largely made of copies from ancient Greece. But in any case its memory was heavily imprinted in the modern world, not just for the size of its conquests but for the other things mentioned.

Territorially, that would be 117 CE. In that year, the emperor Trajan would die without having completed his last great conquest. However, by breaking precedent and adding the new territories like Dacia, Armenia, and Mesopotamia to Rome’s dominion for the first time in decades, Trajan had already brought Rome the most territory it would ever have.

The Roman army reached its peak strength in this year as well. It reached a size of over 150,000 regular legionaries and an equal number of auxiliary soldiers; it was well-supplied by rapid transport on Roman highways; the training, discipline, and level of experience were all top-notch; and most importantly, the army was defined by a goal of fighting for Rome and not any specific general.

Economically, the first half of the reign of Antoninus Pius was unchallenged. During that period, Rome’s production capabilities, trade volume, and resource extraction reached peak efficiency. Prosperity was truly in the air as Roman greatness hung over every corner of the Mediterranean world. There were no foreign enemies, no internal usurpers, no economic issues of any sort.

The people were fed, they had access to entertainment and exotic goods, they could move freely through the empire without fear of molestation or transportation issues, they could easily find jobs within the booming economy, and they were able to start large families in the midst of a gargantuan population boom.

Morally, there really was no period where Romans were more moral or ethical than the Romans of any other period. However, if you asked the Senatorial class, they would quietly grumble that the empire had brought nothing but decadence and that Rome needed to return to republican virtues. Their propaganda, which they used to distort their tellings about people they disliked such as Nero, Domitian, and Commodus, still have profound influences in the form of misinformation and incorrect historiography today.

A whole bunch of things

He was patient and thoughtful. In battles at this time, there was a routine. Once the armies came into contact with each other they would deploy each day for battle and stare across the field at each other. Then if one side felt they had an advantage like having the high ground or favorable weather condition they would try to force the battle. The other side would then either commit to battle by choice or force- or they would decline battle and return to their camp. This could go on for weeks. Caesar was known to be very good at this part of war. He was known to have near-infinite patience and would wait and wait until he felt he had all the possible advantages he could. Caesar would always send scouts to find enemy positions and never rush into anything. Simply put he took his time so that he never put himself at a disadvantage.

He fought with his men. Many generals would either be way in the back or would fight with the cavalry. Caesar would set up his command right behind the battle. That way we could get news and issue orders quickly. You can imagine a big battle between huge armies that would be spread out over many miles. Being in the thick of things allowed Caesar to respond to developments quickly and efficiently. If the situation demanded it Caesar himself would charge into battle to rally his men. Many generals would set out a plan and then fight with the cavalry. This was a stupid choice as it took them out of the battle and kept them from issuing commands. Caesar found a good balance here.

Caesar delegated very well. When he saw someone with talent he was quick to promote them and give them room to use their talents. He was not a control freak or a micro-manager. Instead, he would give lofty command positions and near-total freedom to generals, he found to be skilled. Caesar wasn’t one for fancy flanking maneuvers or crazy battle formations (like Alexander the Great). Caesar would focus on the big picture and allow his skilled and experienced sub-commanders to do all the crazy maneuvers. Some of Rome's most brilliant commanders came from Caesar's armies. Below pictures is Lanienus- a commander that served under Caesar who was every bit his equal and this lead the legions in Caesar's name for years.

Caesar inspired loyalty. After his invasion when Caesar's army was sailing home a group of ships got separated from the rest in a storm and landed way up shore from the rest. These men were immediately surrounded by angry Gauls who were out for blood. These men were badly outnumbered but none the less got into formation and held firm, refusing to surrender. It would have been logical to surrender and hope for mercy but they knew their general and they knew what he would do. They were right because as soon as Caesar found out he took every horse and solider he could find and rode like a mad man to help is surrounded soldiers. He got there in time and crashed through the Gaulic army, routing them with ease and saving his troops. This was a huge risk for Caesar and it wasn’t that many men to be a tactically big loss. But Caesar cared for his troops and never wasted their lives. For this they loved him. He also made them rich with slaves and plunder. These veteran legionnaires would be die-hard loyalists. They would fight on past their term of service on campaign after campaign- even sometimes going unpaid. Caesar beat Pompey and many others off the back of this large army of loyal men.

Caesar was also politically connected. This meant money, troops, and a free hand in Gaul.

Last, the Roman army was strong. They had the best-organized military on earth and featured the most capable and armed heavy infantry around. If ambushed or surrounded they were terrible but in a standard battle, they were nearly unstoppable. They were also master builders- able to construct roads, bridges, and forts on the fly and Caesar used this ability time and time again. Caesar knew though that the Legions had weaknesses and Caesar would always used allied troops to fill in these weak spots. For instance, Gaulic cavalry was a huge part of Caesar's army.

Technically Rome became autonomous when Diocletian created the Tetrarchy 293 AD. The new capitals were Trier, Milan, Sirmium and Nicomedia. Tax revenues were shunted away from Rome. Diocletian gave the city a tax-exempt status. So the Roman Senate became a city council. They had to raise revenues from illegally parked chariots, over-speeding carts/ wagons/ horses and littering (good luck with that one). So technically the city of Rome was ruled by the Roman Empire.

Then Constantine reunited the empire in 312. But in 330 he changed the capital to Nova Roma. Then it split into two. The capital was changed from Milan to Ravenna in 402. When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. Odoacer pledged to be a vassal of Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno. Then Zeno gave the title of King of Italy to Theodoric the Great king of the Ostrogoths. Who simply chopped Odoacer from collarbone to crotch in 493.

Then in 535, Belisarius conquered Rome for Justinian. Then in 754, the Pope declared independence from the Eastern Roman Empire and founded the Papal States. The seat of government was restored to Rome. In 800, another Pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans. He ruled from Aachen. Then Emperor Lothair divided Middle Francia in 855 into the Kingdoms of Lothringia, Burgundy and Italy in the Treaty of Prum.

The last emperor Berengar I died in 912. The Pope ruled over Rome, Ravenna and Perugia. Then in 962, Otto the Great was crowned Emperor of the Romans. He ruled the Holy Roman Empire from Magdeburg.

In 1176, the Papal States and Lombard League armies ambushed Emperor Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano. He barely escaped alive. So the Papal States was defacto independent.

Then in 1309, King Philippe IV le Bel invited the pope to stay in Avignon. It was an offer he couldn't refuse. So Rome was ruled from Avignon until 1376.

In 1527, Emperor Charles V's troops mutinied over lack of pay. They ransacked the city of Rome. They killed and raped the inhabitants. The soldiers left the next year.

Then General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy for the French Republic in 1794. In 1814, the Congress of Vienna restored the Papal States except for Avignon. Then in 1860, Garibaldi reunited Italy under the House of Savoy. The Papal States lost its territories east of the Apennine mountains. Emperor Napoleon III of France sent troops to protect Rome itself. Then the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870. The troops were withdrawn and the Savoiards moved in.

Postscriptum:

The Papacy regained independence in 1929, but they no longer ruled Rome itself. Just Vatican City, Lateran Palace and few other sites.

He was a brilliant tactician.

Caesar's military achievements were extraordinary. He conquered Gaul, which at the time was a vast and powerful region, and he also led successful campaigns in Spain, Egypt, and North Africa.

He was able to outmaneuver his opponents and win decisive victories.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to foresee his own death by his right hand Brutus.

Sharing just for knowledge ﷺ

(This submission is open to criticism and disagreement from anyone)

Whilе thе Roman Empirе was incrеdibly powеrful, sеvеral Islamic and non Islamic еmpirеs surpassеd it in tеrms of sizе, military strеngth, or cultural influеncе. Hеrе's a concisе ovеrviеw:

Islamic Empirеs

1. Umayyad Caliphatе (661–750 CE): Thе Umayyads built onе of thе largеst еmpirеs of thеir timе, spanning from Spain to Cеntral Asia. Thеir military strеngth and thе rapid sprеad of Islam madе thеm dominant in both Europе and thе Middlе East.

2. Abbasid Caliphatе (750–1258 CE): Known for its cultural and intеllеctual achiеvеmеnts, thе Abbasid Caliphatе bеcamе a global cеntеr for sciеncе, philosophy, tradе, oftеn еxcееding Romе in its еconomic powеr.

3. Ottoman Empirе (1299–1922): Thе Ottomans controllеd vast tеrritoriеs in Europе, thе Middlе East and North Africa. Thеir military strеngth and control ovеr kеy tradе routеs madе thеm a major world powеr for cеnturiеs.

4. Mughal Empirе (1526–1857): In India, thе Mughals rulеd ovеr a vast and divеrsе population, with significant contributions to art, architеcturе and tradе, making thеm onе of thе wеalthiеst еmpirеs of thеir timе.

Non Islamic Empirеs

1. Mongol Empirе (13th–14th cеnturiеs): Thе Mongols built thе largеst contiguous еmpirе in history, conquеring from Europе to China with unmatchеd military spееd and tactics.

2. Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE): Thе Han Empirе in China rivalеd Romе in population, military strеngth and cultural achiеvеmеnts, particularly through innovations likе papеr and silk.

3. Qing Dynasty (1644–1912): Thе Qing Dynasty rulеd a largе, prospеrous еmpirе in East Asia, surpassing Romе in wеalth and population.

4. British Empirе (19th–20th cеnturiеs): At its hеight, thе British Empirе controllеd about a quartеr of thе world's land and population, dominating global tradе and politics.

Thеsе еmpirеs, in diffеrеnt rеgions and timеs, surpassеd Romе's powеr in tеrms of tеrritorial rеach, military strеngth, cultural influеncе and еconomic dominancе.

There was no Legion responsible for guarding Rome, the Legions were stationed on the frontier, the majority were situated in Gaul, Germania, Dacia, and England. It was seen as a criminal act to bring an army into Rome unless it was for a triumph, however, most major cities had a small garrison or a militia force, which Rome did have.

Firstly, there is a need to clarify what one means by the word ‘Empire’, because the word has two different meanings. One is that of state ruling over great swathes of territory with a wide variety of peoples. Using that terminology, the late Roman Republic was an Empire as it ruled much of Mediterranean. The other is the form of government with an Emperor as absolute ruler; Rome became an ‘Empire’ in 27 BC with Augustus becoming Princeps (though officially Rome was still a Republic).

Now that this has been clarified, I will answer how Rome became an Empire in both the first and second senses of the word:

Roman Imperial Expansion:

Rome managed to create an Empire due to a multitude of factors, the most important of them being its political system and its reserves of manpower.

The nature of the Roman Republic fostered both consensus between the elites regarding the rotation of leading families in power (when this consensus came crumbling down during the last century of the Republic, the republican form of government collapsed) and competition between the aristocrats. The Roman aristocrats needed Auctoritas, prestige which gave them (political) authority. This was especially true for Consuls who had only a year to do something great. Victorious generals would be granted a triumph and be treated as if they were a God that day.

As such, the Roman state was extremely warlike even by ancient standards. It went to war almost every years since the 350s. While Hannibal was still ravaging Italy, the Romans were willing to send armed forces to campaign against the Macedonians (First Macedonian War - 214–205 BC). This willingness of the Romans to wage war (mainly due to domestic reasons and the nature of Roman politics) gave them the edge over their opponents.

A second advantage the Romans had was their reserves of manpower. Manpower can be very important for an expanding imperial state. The Romans, in their conquests, enslaved many peoples and used them for manual labor, thus freeing up Roman farmers for military service who would otherwise be laboring. More than a few those slaves were eventually freed and were granted some political rights (freedmen). The Romans, unlike the Athenians and other Greek city states, were also willing to grant Roman or Latin citizenship to foreigners. This meant that the citizen body was constantly expanded, thus increasing the number of potential soldiers.

This advantage in manpower allowed the Romans to withstand the crushing defeats they suffered when Hannibal invaded Italy. According to both ancient and modern estimates, more than 300,000 Romans were killed in the Second Punic War. Another state would have been crippled by such loss of manpower (think of the Spartans; their military might was crushed forever due to lack of citizens who could serve as soldiers). Yet the Romans managed to keep sending army after army and eventually not only survived and won the war, but were able to expand in the eastern Mediterranean.

Last but not least, the Roman army played an important role in the success of the Romans; the Romans had better logistics, organization and discipline than their opponents. The legions were far more flexible as a military unit than the phalanx the Greeks used (thus the crushing defeats they suffered at the hands of the Romans). The Romans were also willing to adapt; thus their creation of a large navy during the First Punic War in order to defeat Carthage. It should be noted, however, that without the political system and manpower reserves the Romans had, it is unlikely that they would have gone so far as they did; the Roman army was pretty good, but not good enough to secure imperial expansion on its own.

Rome becomes an Imperial Regime:

The Roman Republic collapsed and became an imperial regime due in large part to its stunning success.

The constant wars overseas and the need to campaign in faraway territories (such as Asia Minor and Hispania) as the Roman Republic entered the Hellenistic Word and annexed provinces led to devastation for the farmers who constituted most of the troops: their farms were not cultivated while large landowners using slave labor got them out of business. This led to social unrest (such as the attempt of the Gracchi for reform and the violence that ensued).

Gaius Marius, a Roman general, partially solved Rome’s problem with his reforms. He created a standing professional army which included landless Romans. While this new army performed very well on the field of battle, the soldiers gave their allegiance not to the state but rather to the general who led them to victory and provided them with the spoils of war. Also those reforms did not manage to alleviate social unrest.

Gaius Marius

Some aristocrats saw in the popular discontent a chance to gain power. Those formed the Populares, the populist faction who campaigned the cause of the disaffected. Some of the Populares as well as some of the Optimates, the conservative faction, also saw in the new, professionalized army of Marius the means with which they could gain power since (as stated above) the soldiers were more loyal to their general than to the Roman state. Ambitious generals such as Sulla used the army in domestic conflicts; Sulla marched on Rome twice and became dictator thanks to the support of the soldiers.

Julius Caesar was, though, by far the most successful of the generals who used the army to gain political power. After his success in Gaul (58 - 51 BC), his enemies tried to eliminate him and thus he moved his army against the Republic. By the end of the civil war and his victory over Pompey, he had become absolute ruler of the Roman state. Although he was assassinated in 44 BC, by this time the Republic could not be saved. Augustus completed what Caesar started. Although he claimed to have restored the Republic, Augustus effectively became the first Roman Emperor.

This is a really long answer, but bear with me and we can ruffle some establishment feathers.

Ready? It didn't.

The most traditional answer to this question was given by Sir Edward Gibbon, in his famous "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I'll outline it here shortly as follows.

According to Gibbon:

1) The Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens.
They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to "barbarian" (I'll get to this is a minute) mercenaries, who then became so numerous and ingrained that they were able to take over the Empire.

2) Romans, he believed, had become effeminate unwilling to live a tougher, "manly" military lifestyle.
3) Christianity created a belief that a better life existed after death, which fostered an indifference to the present among Roman citizens, thus sapping their desire to sacrifice for the Empire. He also believed its comparative pacifism tended to hamper the traditional Roman martial spirit.

4) Finally, like other Enlightenment thinkers, Gibbon held in contempt the Middle Ages (which I like to think of as Late Late Antiquity) as a priest-ridden, superstitious, dark age. It was not until his own age of reason and rational thought, it was believed, that human history could resume its progress.
In terms of specific actions Gibbon sees the Praetorian Guard as the primary catalyst of the empire's initial decay and eventual collapse, a seed planted by Augustus at the establishment of the empire. He cites repeated examples of the Praetorian Guard abusing their power with calamitous results, including numerous instances of imperial assassination and incessant demands for increased pay.

BUT - Now to take Gibbon to task:

1) It does not really matter which historical camp you fall into: The Roman Empire did not fall in 476 AD. Perhaps, the Western portion of the Empire "fell", but it is a fact that the Eastern Roman Empire continued on until 1453, undisputedly.
Even then, the case shall be made that it never really came to an end (in a few moments).

2) "barbarians" - Of course Gibbon was going to perceive what happened as "the end of Western Civilization" and those that moved in as "barbarians" because he only ever used Roman sources who perceived it to be this way as well #heavily-biased

Recent research has revealed that the "barbarians" created art, had culture, their own systems of government and differed widely from tribe to tribe i.e. they were not just one homogenous lump of "barbarians" educated enough to pick up an axe and wield it.

3) Moreover, what really changed? Did the Germanic tribes bring in their own language, religion, and institutions? Not at all, instead they learned Latin, continued to use Roman institutions and roads, and converted to Christianity.

What I present you with is the idea that Rome continues: hereditarily, linguistically, institutionally, geographically, and yes even as an idea, up until the very present.

Hereditarily: The Last Byzantine (Eastern Roman) princess, Princess Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Constantine XI married Ivan III of Russia. In this way the Russians would lay claim to the title Tsar (from the word Caesar) and continue to use it as a title for their monarchs until the 20th century. Moscow was also called "the Third Rome". From this perspective Rome, the city, was perceived of as the first capital of the Roman Empire, Constantinople was the second capital, and now Moscow was "the third" capital of the Roman Empire.

Institutionally: The Western Roman Church never ceased to function, even as the government teetered on the brink and collapsed. It continues on today still as the Roman Catholic Church. The Bishop of Rome (i.e. the Pope) even retains the title of Pontifex Maximus, an Imperial Title, and the title of the highest religious official in the Roman Empire. The history of how the Pope came to acquire this particular title is a bit dubious, but that the Church, a Roman institution, has continued unimpeded until the present is established fact. Up until the past ten years the Roman Pontiffs have also traditionally used the title "Patriarch of the West'". They still reserve the right to use this title and that they have not used it recently is not so much a sign of humility, rather it is more along the lines of "Why should I be limited to the West in a more global world?" , but I digress.

In addition, Charlemagne was crowned by the Bishop of Rome as "Holy Roman Emperor" in the year 800AD. He was subsequently recognized by the Eastern Roman Emperor as well, as Basileus of the West. This means a lot considering that Eastern Roman Emperors stylized themselves as Basileus of the East, and that this title came from a completely uninterrupted line of political succession.The Last Holy Roman Emperor finally abdicated in 1806. But even here this is not where the political continuity ended

The Principality of Liechtenstein (a microstate in Europe) is the sole remaining polity of the Holy Roman Empire, having been created out of the counties of Vaduz and Schellenburg in 1719 as a sovereign fief for the wealthy Austrian House of Liechtenstein. Its population is over 35,000. Owing to its geographic position between Switzerland and Austria, it was not swallowed up during the reorganisation of Germany following the French Revolution, and avoided incorporation into the German Empire later in the 19th century. It still exists today in 2013.

As for the East, even after the Fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans continued to call their leader the Sultan of Rum ( Sultanate of Rum "Rum" meaning "Rome" in Persian and Turkish).
And though the religion changed (and many Greek Orthodox people today despise the Fall of Constantinople) many of the institutions remained, and the city would continue to be called "Constantinople" until the end of WWI. The first sultans of the area were also quick to marry Byzantine princesses as a further way of legitimizing their claims. Constantinople also remained the capital of the Ottoman Empire until its fall in 1923 when revolutionares renamed it Istanbul .

Linguistically: Latin continued to be the language of education until the mid-20th century, any major academic work was required to be in Latin until the mid-17th century, it is still taught is schools today, and is still the official language of theRoman Catholic Church.

Geographic Continuity - Rome, the Eternal City (because it never really dies), is still the seat of power of the Pontifex Maximus, the capital of the Holy See, and Italy. Constantinople, while now called Istanbul, is still a thriving cosmopolitan city on the straits of the Bosporus, with its origins deeply rooted in the year 330AD when it was founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who in a very Roman fashion, named the city after himself.

By now you may start to see a case for Rome still being alive much after the given date of 476AD, and that a variety of states and institutions might well lay a claim to being successors of Rome, if not the continuation of it. But what did the people who were members of these states and institutions themselves think?

It is very clear that the Eastern Romans thought of themselves as an unimpeded, uninterrupted continuation of Rome. And though historians have customarily treated the state of the later Eastern Roman Empire under the name "Byzantine Empire", Byzantine is not a term that the Byzantines (East Romans) ever used to describe themselves. Instead they thought of themselves as "Roman" and living in the "Roman Empire".

The Holy Romans also continued to explicitly think of themselves as a continuation of Rome. Even after the last Emperor abdicated in 1806 and there was much political confusion, German political leaders continued to stylize themselves in a way that referenced this idea and heritage. For example Kaiser Wilhelm II was called Kaiser (which comes from "Caesar). I would not call this a direct political line given the gap and confusion between 1806 and the rule of the Kaisers, but it can certainly be called a succession, and certainly the Kaisers would have understood it this way. If not they would have never taken the name.

Lastly, The Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church also see themselves in the world today as the continuers of Rome, without any fraction of a doubt. At the risk of repeating myself I'll just lightly reference the continuity of the Office of the Bishop of Rome from the time of the Romans until the present. In terms of the East, religious and political continuity is not as clear. What is clear though is the fervent culture of opposition maintained by the Greeks and Greek Orthodox believers for centuries under their Ottoman oppressors. In this way many Greek nationals and Greek Orthodox (which more than not are one in the same) see themselves not just as the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, but the sons and daughters of a people whose history goes back to the Ancient Greeks.

Onward then to the idea of Rome; Romanitas
The idea of Rome will never die. We live in a world defined by the Romans. The basis of our legal code, our architecture, our entertainment values, political spirit and ambitions is all defined by the ideals of Rome. Just look at our architecture. The founding fathers of the United States even sought to imitate Roman ideals and virtues.

(this is an image of the Capitol Building, done in the Neo-Classical Style)

There in no direct political link or uninterrupted political succession between the United States and Ancient Rome, but there is a connection in the ideals upon which the United States was founded through Roman Literature with which the Founding Fathers would have been well acquainted with (and indeed most educated people until recently, when emphasis on the Classics has been shifted elsewhere). Though it is a controversial topic, here are a few articles that deal with the topic of America as a "New Rome"

themontrealreview.com Is America the New Rome?

Every global empire since the "Discovery of the New World" has also attempted to share in this legacy. Either by declaring themselves Emperor as Napoleon did, declaring their nation to be the Third Rome as Adolf Hitler did (aka the Third Reich), or by simply lying about their genealogy to somehow claim that they were descended from some famous Roman Emperor as nearly all the monarchies of Western Europe did throughout the Age of Exploration.

Maybe I have won you over to the idea that Rome is still alive today?
But even if I have not, I hope that you will at least know that a lot has changed since the time of Sir Edward Gibbon, in terms of research and what most believe went on. The "Decline and Fall" of the Roman Empire was certainly not the end of civilization as we know it, and many of the institutions and things that the Romans did affect how we live today. Some historians would go so far as to say there was no decline or fall at all, most however, fall somewhere in between… or shall I say that "Most historians decline and fall somewhere between the two theories"

And,

Certainly you will have learned the lesson of history that:
Most of the things that we do today have been done before, it is our challenge, therefore, not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

As a couple of answers have noted, it was the Western Roman Empire that collapsed, while the Eastern Empire continued for another 1000 years - it even expanded at a couple of points after the fall of the West, So the key to the fall lies in looking at what was different between the Eastern and Western Empires:

1. Economics - The east was always the economic powerhouse of the Empire. It was vastly more populous, had more resources, was more heavily urbanised and had a larger taxable population base. That was fine for as long as the Empire was one entity ruled from Rome. But by the later Fourth Century a purely administrative division of long standing, whereby two emperors ruled in the east and the west, hardened into a permanent division into two separate competing (and occasionally warring) political entities.

Once that happened, the West was always going to be the economic poor relation. It was lumbered with half of the very large and very expensive later Roman Army and with long and difficult borders to defend and yet had to do it with a smaller population, less resources, more poorer provinces to support and defend and a smaller taxable base. Even without its other problems (see below), this was going to be a struggle.

2. Internal Divisions - The West's economic woes were greatly worsened by internal conflicts both within the Western Empire and between it and its Eastern counterpart. Between 316 and its end in 476 AD the Western Empire saw no less than six major civil wars, with usurpers challenging Emperors, Emperors being deposed and murdered and generals carrying out wars against each other. In addition, the West periodically tried to pursue an aggressive policy against its supposed Eastern partner, including several incursions into the Eastern Empire by the Western general Stilicho. In turn, the East often deflected barbarian armies by encouraging them to head west to afflict the Western Empire instead.

All this infighting drained the already over-stretched economic resources of the weaker of the two Empires, with the defence of the borders against barbarians often taking a back seat to the defeat of usurpers and rebel generals. This in turn made some of the West's provinces feel the administration did not care about their security and they turned to local leaders for defence. Thus the West was further afflicted by bandit armies of bacaudae rebels and several provinces, such as northern Gaul and Dalmatia, simply detached themselves from the Empire and settled their own affairs.

The East, by contrast, managed to contain or avoid these kinds of crippling civil conflicts. For various reasons, the Eastern Empire never allowed military power to be concentrated in one person, as happened with the magistri militum in the West. Even the weaker eastern emperors were dominated by a number of civil advisors, which meant a single military-backed "power behind the throne" tended not to be a target for military rivals, as happened repeatedly in the West.

3. External Threats - Modern historians have generally overturned the Nineteenth Century idea of a militarily soft and degenerate later Empire being overrun by vast hordes of vigorous barbarians. The later Roman Army remained a highly flexible, elite and well-trained and equipped force virtually to the end. The army that defended the West was the same in training, arms and armour and tactics as that of the East, so clearly it was not any decline in the army that caused the collapse.

This is borne out by looking at the track record of Roman troops in the period: almost without exception, when a Roman force met a barbarian army in battle, the Romans won the day. But the constant attrition of both wars with invading warbands and, more importantly, civil wars within the Empire, wore down the cash-strapped Western Empire and made it harder and harder to field and sustain the levels of troop numbers required. It was cheaper and easier to pay barbarian warbands to fight for Rome and supplement the regular army, but this had significant consequences in the longer run.

The numbers of the barbarians were never great (and are regularly hugely exaggerated by the Roman sources). The problem was that the Empire was crumbling at the edges and civil conflicts meant it eventually began to collapse around the Army. Almost all of the successful barbarian incursions were in the face of minimal or even no resistance from the Army at all, since it was usually occupied elsewhere with some other incursion or, more regularly, with the latest internecine conflict.

If there was one event that spelled the inevitable collapse of the Western Empire, it was the loss of north Africa to the Vandals in 439 AD. This was the richest province of the Empire and the breadbasket whose grain sustained much of the West's economic life. The Vandals had crossed the Rhine unopposed back in 406 AD when the Romans had been distracted by the latest civil war. They had been brought into submission and settled in Spain, but never fully brought under control. One account has them entering Africa at the invitation of the local military ruler Bonifacius to support him against the generalissimo Aetius in yet another civil conflict. The Vandals stayed and ruled the province for the next century.

With Africa gone, the collapse of the Western Empire accelerated, with more and more territory slipping from the control of the weakening and bankrupt central administration. Territories in Gaul and Spain fell under barbarian control not by way of invasion and conquest, but because the locals turned to the nearest military leader to protect them from other threats - many of these leaders happened to be barbarian foederati.

So the traditional idea of Rome collapsing under the weight of either its own "corruption" or masses of northern barbarians, or both, is not correct. The main issues were internal conflicts (which the East managed to contain or avoid) and economic poverty (which the East simply did not have). Far from being weak or outdated, the Roman Army remained effective almost to the end. And rather than being the cause of the collapse of the Empire, the barbarians were more of a symptom of deeper systemic weaknesses.

Ancient Rome was at its peak during the first and second centuries a.d. The early empire was a most prosperous time, opportunities for advancement were great. The so-called Pax Romana was protected by the Roman legions. They were an effective fighting force that kept the peace and enabled mostly free trade to flourish from the North Sea to the sands of the Sahara.

Upward nobility offered opportunities to all classes to improve the conditions of their lives. Even slaves could achieve freedom and grow fantastically wealthy. Gladiatorial games and chariot races were hugely popular (not unlike baseball and football for Americans today). Where we have spas, the Romans had baths in every city where families could go to cool off and have a pleasant afternoon.

During this glorious period the average citizen worked two days a year to pay his taxes. Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome during this triumphal period. The heir to the throne, Commodious, ruled over the start of Rome’s ever-deepening decline.

Peace and prosperity began breaking down in the 3rd century with the invasions of Persian and Germanic tribes. Taxes rose and bureaucratic inefficiencies grew, as well. It was just another case of Aristotle’s cycle of corruption and decay afflicting Rome has it has done so many times before and after, in history.

No, but they started to in the 5th Century. Even the signal defeat by the Goths in 378 AD was within the norms of life within the Empire. In 250 AD a Gothic army had defeated a Roman army and killed the emperor Decius. A short while later the Goths were themselves defeated and the Romans freed to go on with their civil wars. These same Goths were penned in the Balkans by the Emperor Theodosius in the 380s and then contributed troops to his armies who marched against the Western half of the Empire. Things did begin to change aroubd 410 when the Goths took Rome. However, this was more a symbolic than a real disaster as the real caputals at that time were Ravenna ( West) and Constantinople (East) . As we progress through the 5th century it became plainer to Romans in the Western half of the Empire that things had chnged Britain had gone, Gaul was effectively being divided up by barbarians, Africa had gone . However, the Romans had a problem when thinking about their situation. If you lived in Roman Africa, for example, it had been a province of the Empire for 600 years. If in Gaul , part of the Empire for 450 years. For all that tome there had been no other comparable political organisation on the frontier. Only in the East was there a comparable power, but even in the East Rome had held its lands for 400 years. When we think about it this is about as far back as Columbus discovering America, its twice as long as the time the USA has existed as an independent state. Romans found it really hard to imagine something that was not the Empire. The barbarians themselves clearly struggled to conceptualise a situation in which they were going to set up independent kingdoms . Barbarian kings were kings of the Franks, or Goths or Burgundians or Swabians, or king of the Vandals and Alans, they were not kings of territories or countries. The Romans themselves had no concept of being king of a province, Roman rebels aimed to be emperor, or one of several emperors sharing authority. Hence there were no breakaway Roman kingdoms, just the kings of tribes that had lodged in the empire and grabbed land. These tribes had generally moved around and been moved by the imperial authorities, so if you were a Roman thinker and writer you would expect them to move again or be destroyed…once the times were back in joint and the Empire had the piwer to defeat or overawe them.

Barbarians were largely illiterate so we only know what they thought from Roman sources. The Romans, themselves clearly thought that the world was out of joint, but its doubtful that even such negative thinkers as St Jerome thought that the tribulations on them were anything but temporary punishments because, until the end of the 5th century it was difficult to conceive what other form of organisation there could be. Remember too, that the barbarians had sevond hand religion, hardly any culture but a few folk songs, unimpressive cuisine, hardly any building skills, no cities. How could a cultured Roman believe that this lot were going to repkace them??

Denial, mostly. For example, we have this poem from Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, circa 400:

Some dare to blame us for disastrous wars,
Since we have spurned the altars of the gods,
And say that Hannibal was driven back
By Mars and Jupiter from the Colline Gate,
That from the Capitol Senones fled
Because the gods fought on the rock above!
Let those who harp upon our past defeats
And ancient woes note that in your regime
I suffer no such ills. No savage foe
Knocks at my gates, no strange barbarian
Roams through my captured streets and carries off
My youth in bondage far beyond the Alps.

[…]

Who now comes hungry to the circus shows?
What mill is silent on Janiculum?
What great provisions every province brings,
What harvests from the earth's rich bosoms flow
Is shown by bread you give your people, Rome,
Which feeds the sloth of such great multitudes.

(BTW, this poem was written because someone wanted to bring back a statue that had been removed by a shift in morality; the poet wanted to ridicule such embarrassing, retrograde ideas of Roman greatness. Sound familiar?)

Or this ode to Rome, from Rutilius Claudius Namatianus in 416:

The time that remains [for Rome] is subject to no limits as long as lands endure and the heavens support the stars. What has caused other realms to fall to pieces restores you.

By the time these poems were written, Rome hadn’t had proper land management for 200 years (after the fallow land law of 193), hadn’t had any proper jurists for 250 (Gaius is the last Western jurist known to us), and had been ruled by increasingly violent tyrants for some generations. Only the economy was still running smoothly, for the time being.

A generation later, after Western Rome had lost a number of wars to the Germans and the economy started to collapse, a few Gallo-Romans started to acknowledge in writing what was going on. We have this poem from Sidonius Apollinaris c. 450, talking about the Goths who he is forced to give quarter to in his home:

Why ... do you bid me compose a song dedicated to Venus the lover of
Fescennine mirth, placed as I am among the long-haired hordes, having
to endure German speech, praising oft with wry face the song of the
gluttonous Burgundian who spreads rancid butter on his hair? Do you
want me to tell you what wrecks all my poetry? Driven away by
barbarian thrumming the Muse has spurned the six-foot exercise ever
since she beheld these patrons seven feet high. … You don't have a reek of garlic and foul onions discharged upon you at early morn from ten breakfasts, and you are not invaded before dawn ... by a crowd of giants.

But after this came the Dark Ages. Only Eastern Romans in Byzantium got to enjoy the Roman standard of living, after that.

Fascinatingly to me, Sidonius Apollinaris was worshipped as a saint in France, seemingly just because he was one of the last literate Gallo-Roman elites and converted to Christianity. It kind of sounds like “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.

Disintegration of the Western Roman Empire wasn't completely unique, but the circumstances did differ from the way some empires fall apart.

The key to Rome's phenomenal wealth at its peak was its vast mining operations across Europe. Rome was producing more gold and silver than the rest of the world combined. But the emperors never really planned for what would happen when the mines stopped producing. When that occurred, the Empire was unprepared. Thankfully the Eastern provinces had very well developed economies, not because of the Romans, but because of the kingdoms that had existed there before the Romans ever arrived. The western provinces, other than North Africa, simply declined. Eventually the west became so stagnant that there was no way to hold the Western Roman Empire together. The Germanic mercenaries that had previously helped defend the Empire instead moved in and carved up the Western Empire in a series of relatively bloodless coups (not completely bloodless, but there were no large wars).

At its height, around 117 AD during the reign of Emperor Trajan, the Roman Empire was a colossal entity that spanned approximately 5 million square kilometers (about 1.93 million square miles). This impressive expanse included territories across Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia, encompassing regions that are now modern-day Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and more.

To put this in perspective, let’s compare the Roman Empire’s size to that of modern nations like Great Britain and France. Today, the United Kingdom covers about 243,610 square kilometers (approximately 94,058 square miles), while France is larger at roughly 551,695 square kilometers (about 213,011 square miles). Even when combined, these two countries total around 795,305 square kilometers, which is less than one-sixth of the Roman Empire’s peak size.

The Roman Empire’s reach was not just vast in terms of land; it also encompassed a diverse array of cultures, languages, and peoples. From the Celtic tribes in Britain to the Berber communities in North Africa, the Empire was a melting pot of civilizations. Its administrative prowess allowed for the integration of various local customs, laws, and practices, leading to a unique blend of Roman and local cultures, seen in everything from architecture to religion.

The Romans were masterful builders and engineers, creating an extensive network of roads that connected the farthest corners of their empire, facilitating trade and military movements. The famous saying “All roads lead to Rome” reflects the centrality of the capital in this sprawling domain. These roads were crucial for maintaining control over such a vast area, allowing the rapid deployment of legions to quell unrest or defend against invasions.

In terms of population, estimates suggest that the Roman Empire housed around 50 to 100 million people at its zenith, which represented a significant portion of the world’s population at that time. This demographic diversity contributed to a vibrant economy and cultural life, with cities like Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch becoming centers of trade, art, and learning.

While comparing the Roman Empire to modern nations can be tricky due to differences in governance, culture, and technology, the sheer scale of the Empire remains staggering. It was larger than many contemporary nations combined, and its influence is still felt today in aspects such as language (with Romance languages derived from Latin), law, architecture, and government systems.

Yes, there have been empires throughout history that rivaled ancient Rome in terms of greatness and longevity. One notable example is the Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, which was a continuation of the Roman Empire in the East following the division of the Roman Empire in 395 AD. The Byzantine Empire lasted for over a thousand years, from 330 AD to 1453 AD, making it one of the longest-lasting empires in history.

The Byzantine Empire was known for its rich cultural heritage, including impressive architecture, intricate mosaics, and contributions to art, literature, and philosophy. It was also a major center of trade and commerce, connecting the East and West through its strategic location between Europe and Asia.

In terms of military prowess, the Byzantine Empire successfully defended itself against numerous invasions and external threats over the centuries. Emperors like Justinian I expanded the empire’s territories, reclaiming parts of the Western Roman Empire and establishing a legal code that would influence European laws for centuries to come.

Another empire that can be compared to ancient Rome in terms of greatness and longevity is the Ottoman Empire, which emerged in the 13th century and lasted until the early 20th century. At its height, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents and was a dominant force in the Mediterranean region.

The Ottoman Empire was known for its strong centralized government, efficient bureaucracy, and military power. It controlled key trade routes and territories, including Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), which served as the empire’s capital and a cultural hub.

Like Rome, the Ottoman Empire blended diverse cultures and religions within its borders, fostering a rich and dynamic society. Its legacy includes significant architectural achievements, such as the iconic mosques and palaces that still stand today.

While both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires eventually declined and fell, their legacies continue to influence the modern world. Their achievements in governance, culture, and military strategy demonstrate that they were indeed comparable to ancient Rome in terms of greatness and longevity.

There are many things about life in Ancient Rome that we do not know, as it was a very long time ago. However, it would really depend on the area of Rome that you were standing in. The Ancient Romans usually integrated people into their army, but toward the end of Rome this strategy did not work as well. So they just stopped caring, and since Rome spanned a very large area it is hard to say what it would have been like. I believe, though, you're asking as if you were standing at the heart of Rome itself.

When you first get into the city of Rome housing is your first priority. Apartment buildings, called insulae were scattered around the city. At around 150 BCE there were about 46,000 insulae around the city. The insulae themselves were incredibly overcrowded and terrible to live in, as these were only for the poor and peasants in the Roman social class. To make matters worse, not much attention was placed on making Roman roads wider, so in the case of fires and such it was hard to get away. It was not until the Great Fire of Rome under the rule of Emperor Nero that this problem was fixed with wider roads.

Food, of course, everyone needs food, and boy did Romans love their food. The type of food eaten depended upon ones social class; those such as nobles, the wealthy and powerful reclined on a chair while imported spices and foods were served to them by slaves. However, the peasants and other working class usually ate gruel and equally terrible food. Wine was a common drink, but water was available at public fountains.

The working day of a Roman also depended upon social status, but for a normal worker class the working day was usually composed of 6 hours. The rest being used for leisure and rest. Entertainment was also a major factor in the day of a Roman, gladiator fight, chariot races, the theater and baths were just the tip of the Roman leisure iceberg.

Baths, oh baths. The things that Romans like? Baths, wine, olive oil, and food. Baths of the Ancient Roman times were a bit like modern gyms, except for the fact that most were free. They usually composed of a health center, fitness center, swimming pools and the works. Slaves were usually used to keep the heat in certain hot rooms. An emperor could really improve his status by building a lot of baths.

So there, a day in the life of a Roman. Roman lives depended heavily on social status and money. Pleasure was a major factor in a Roman day. If you were to stand in the middle of Rome, you'd most likely see slaves and workers bustling around, trying to get everything done. You wouldn't really see the most powerful people, such as politicians and family heads, as they had basically everything done by slaves. Hope that answered your question.

Sources: Roman Daily Life (A lot of the information was taken from here, if you want to learn more, this is the place.)

I just answered a question about Carthage. Had Hannibal defeated Rome, Carthage would’ve been the supreme power in the Mediterranean, and it would’ve been able to then spread to the East as Rome did.

But once Carthage was defeated, no other great power survived to truly stand in Rome’s way. The Persian Empire had been the great power in the Near East, but it had been brought down by Alexander the Great. Alexander’s Empire, afterward, had split into four pieces administered by four different commanders. And those four sub-empires were never going to reunite with each other; instead, they eyed each other uneasily.

Rome, after conquering Carthage, had the entire Western Mediterranean to itself… but perhaps more importantly, it had, at that time, a strongly patriotic and united citizenry.

But were there Empires on Earth that rivaled Rome? Perhaps, but they were far, far away, in East Asia or South America, too far away to ever really clash with the Roman Empire.

The legions were not supposed to be deployed in the city. Roman legions were not to be stationed in Rome or in Italy south of the Rubicon River.

1. The Urban Cohorts: When Augustus instituted the office of city prefect (praefectus urbi), he also established 3 cohorts (the cohortes urbanae) to constitute a sort of police force for the city of Rome. These troops were also stationed in the camp of the praetorians in Rome, though they served under the command of the city prefect, a man of senatorial rank.
2. In 27 BCE, Augustus founded a new, elite organization, called the Praetorian Guard, to serve as a permanent bodyguard for the emperor. There were originally 9 cohorts, 3 of which were stationed inside Rome with the rest in garrison in nearby towns. While they patrolled inconspicuously in the palace and major buildings and the others were stationed in the towns surrounding Rome, no threats were thought possible from these individual cohorts. The title praetorian had been used during the Roman Republic for the guards of Roman generals and came to prominence under the Scipio family around 275 BCE. The use of the adjectives (praetorius, praetoricius, praetorianus) in a large number of circumstances testifies to a general sense of the leadership function of any corporate body in Rome that might be termed praetorial. Service in the guard was easier and more prestigious than in the legions, and praetorians were paid 2-3 times more than the legionaries. The Praetorians were the equal of any like-sized formation in the Roman Army and were often deployed to deal with mutinies among the Rhine and Pannonian legions. While the Guard had the power to make or break emperors, it had no role in government administration.
3. The Vigiles: The vigiles, also founded by Augustus, served as fire fighters and night watchmen in the city of Rome. Each cohort of vigiles was responsible for two of the 14 regions of the city. They were originally drawn from the ranks of freedmen and were not really soldiers, although they were organized on a quasi-military basis. The commander of the vigiles was a prefect of equestrian rank (the praefectus vigilum). The vigiles were divided into seven cohorts led by minor tribunes who could expect that their next advancement was to be to tribune of an urban cohort. By the third century (CE), these organizations had become wholly military.

The presence of the Praetorian Guards cannot be dismissed. The number of praetorian cohorts changed in proportion to the perceived threat to the Emperor, however. Under Tiberius and through the machinations of their ambitious prefect, Lucius Aelius Sejanus, all 9 cohorts were moved to one camp in Rome (the castra praetoria), and Caligula increased the number of cohorts to 12. The praetorians were under the command of two prefects (later only one) of equestrian rank and were divided into centuries in the usual legionary manner. With their assassination of Caligula and their choice of Claudius as emperor (41 CE), the Praetorian legions effectively replaced the Senate and People of Rome (SPQR) as the source of authority in the empire. Claudius remained grateful to the Praetorians, issuing coins with tributes to them in the early part of his reign. In 284 CE, Diocletian reduced the status of the Praetorians, and they were no longer a major influence in palace life. Constantine disbanded them in 312 CE.

This is an example of getting the cart before the horse…

The English word “Empire” is derived from the original Latin word “imperium,” which Romans used to refer to all the lands that they dominated. What this means is that the Romans IN EFFECT DEFINED WHAT “EMPIRE” WAS BY THEIR EXAMPLE!!!!!!!!

Historical nomenclature gets a little confusing here, because historians will often refer to “empires” before Rome’s. But in some ways that is misleading. The Romans, by their example, created the archetypal empire, the one that in effect defined the word.

And the special nature of that archetype was this: a kind of super-state, in which a central power ruled over far-flung lands with people of different nations… meaning different language, different local laws, and different gods.

Even today, it is common to refer to colonial or expansionist powers as being “imperialist,” meaning to impose their will on foreign cultures. But Rome is the ultimate example, as it was the original “Empire” in some sense.

But the question remains (because it’s an interesting one): What did Rome think of itself? What did the Romans think of their domination over so many other people of other nationalities?

The answer is that the Romans tended to flatter themselves as being the “good guys,” which of course is par for the course. The Romans believed that they had a certain manifest destiny from the gods to export the benefits of “civilization” on people who could not run their own affairs so well. So, they brought the “blessings” of experienced government, military, law, administration, plumbing (they had all those baths), and civil engineering.

The Romans also flattered themselves that they were not warmongers. They told themselves that their wars were essentially defensive in character. However, once the Romans occupied a country, for whatever reason, they didn’t ever leave it. They stayed, maybe because they didn’t think the so-called barbarians could manage to govern themselves. And they saw themselves as the ancient world’s policeman.

Early in their history, the Romans thought of themselves as merely the leading city in the Italian League, a confederation of city states. Then this League was expanded to include the entire Mediterranean basin. Even then, Rome saw itself as the benevolent organizing power, but enlightened enough to let people have their own local laws and customs.

Eventually, hundreds of years after Christ, they gave up pretense of the Empire being a kind of Confederation of states, and came to calling it “the Dominate”… meaning, We make no bones about us being in control!

Note:

The eras of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, from the Roman point of view, actually overlap. Even after Augustus became “princeps” (First Citizen), most Romans thought the Republic was in place for many years, though it was mostly a farce.

And the idea of a Roman imperium predates the end of the Republic, for Rome the Republic had effective control of most of the Mediterranean basin well before Augustus.

However, for historical convenience, it is common to speak of the “Republic” before Augustus consolidated power, and speak of the Roman “Empire” after he did.

1. He was willful and consistent: When Caesar arrived in Gaul, he was heavily in debt, with an impressive literary background and a rocky political career, but he wasn't considered a special general by any means. For the next decade, he woke up every day trying to figure out how he could tear the political structure of Gaul apart and rebuild it so that everyone 'reported' to him. Keep in mind that more than anything in the world, Caesar wanted to be in the middle of the action in Rome - but he knew he needed to subdue Gaul to get the money and experience he needed to become the best ever. I think this was his most important quality

Could you spend 10 years far away from the "action" of your career, to become so good, so wealthy, and so powerful that you become the best ever?

2. He was Inspiring - to all sorts of people: Politicians could not help but be sucked in by his speaking voice - even Cicero admitted that Caesar was one of the best. He knew how to get his soldiers on board with unpopular campaigns. Though I'm sharing the same story as Ethan, below, here's an excerpt from my podcast, where Caesar turns the soldiers' fear to shame to inspiration in his first year in Gaul:

"While the Romans waited for the German Warlord Ariovistus, the legionaries mingled with the local Sequani [Gauls] and heard terrifying stories about the tall and fearsome Germanic warriors, and common soldiers began to complain to their officers that they did not want to fight Ariovistus.

Caesar was none too pleased by this, and called a meeting of the centurions – those officers who led the 80-man units in the legions, and started by questioning their manhood before very rationally explaining his plan for taking care of the Ariovistus problem.

He concluded by letting them know Caesar – he liked to refer to himself in the third person - Caesar would march at dawn, and if the legions wouldn’t join him he would just take his favorite, the 10th, because he knew at least they could be trusted

Naturally, the 10th was honored and the other legions were shamed, so before the sun came up, each legion was marching with their general."

The Romans eventually sent Ariovistus scrambling back across the Rhine.

3. He was Daring & Lucky: The old saying goes - not only was Caesar the best general, he was also the luckiest. It's true, but there's something to be said about his calculated risks - until the very end, they paid off. From his marches with very few men to secure strategic points in Gaul, to confronting Pompey's army of almost 50,000 men with only 22,000 of his own - he wasn't afraid to roll the dice. The best leaders take chances, and then work as hard as possible to prove that it was the right roll of the dice.

I talk about Caesar's leadership a lot in my podcast, episodes 3 - 6. If you are interested, check it out:

iTunes: The Rhine by Joseph Rigodanzo tells stories from the history of France and Germany, featuring stories about Julius Caesar, Atilla the Hun, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler on iTunes

Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/joseph-rigodanzo/the-rhine-stories-and-legends-from-the-contested-frontier-of?refid=stpr

The answers so far mostly cover the phenomenology of the fall (and I am talking here about Rome proper, not Byzantium). This is rather like noting that at 8:15 PM the patient's liver failed and that at 8:19AM he received a blood transfusion.

There is a lot more phenomenology (there's a reason Gibbon's Decline and Fall is 6 volumes; I've gotten halfway through volume 1). Some of the things that haven't been mentioned include the influence of the Praetorian guard, the practice of each new emperor promising the army a big bonus if elected, the fact that Augustus did some very fundamental things to rig the balance of power in his favor when he set the republic aside, etc.

We could go on and on, and people do. The Romans were nothing if not unbelievably verbose in documenting their own history and leaving stuff all over the place. Data is not lacking, unlike in the case of say, the Hittite empire of the 2nd Millennium BC, which we are only just beginning to understand.

There's a lot of data in fact. So I like to ask a synthesis/holistic theory question rather than a biography question about the specifics. Assuming Rome was an organic entity, how did it die, not how did it fall? Which of the following death analogies is most appropriate?

1. It died of old age
2. It died of a specific old age disease, like cancer
3. It died of a fatal birth defect which eventually caught up with it
4. It was murdered
5. It was killed in an accident
6. It was killed by an enemy in a fight
7. It was killed by an enemy in a fight, when it was enfeebled by old age
8. It was killed by an enemy in a fight, when it had been weakened by disease
9. It was killed by an enemy in a fight, when the consequences of a fatal birth defect made it incapable of resisting
10. It was a brittle, un-dead, assembled Frankenstein's monster, never really living in the first place

See where I am going with this? You can finish the list of permutations and combinations. My answer: something between 9 and 10.

Why? You have to zoom out a little bit more and place Rome in the context of the evolutionary history of empires. Let's look at the trajectory in roughly the same region (Near East, North Africa and SE Europe as center)

The oldest so-called empires were nothing of the sort. They were merely the pillage routes of large raiding parties that went on looting sprees. Their catchment area of looting, during the time it took to recover, was called an "empire."

This is a theoretical construct. We know almost nothing about this era of empires. I suspect things like this existed pre-5000 BC.

The next oldest were the gang territory empires. Again, defined by the locus of looting sprees, but these looting sprees were regular, and the loot was taken to a centralized location, where the ganglords built palaces and things. Threat of violence replaced actual violence. Protection money. Violence was like gang warfare. Crips and bloods. Again, theoretical.

The 3rd generation empires are the ones where we actually have historical examples, such as Egyptian and Hittite. They used some of the protection money to actually do things their subjects could not do for themselves. Like provide justice services. This was the first move away from a predatory state to one that actually provided a modicum of welfare value in return. It was still a pretty lousy deal, but at least it was a deal, not theft. Call it an evolution from violently predatory to parasitic with a hint of symbiosis.

The 4th generation empires took this a little further still: Achamedian and Greek (Cyrus, Darius, Alexander). They indulged in state-sponsored knowledge and art creation, which benefited even the slaves of those states.

But until this point, you still basically had a completely predatory-parasitic state that looted, threw a few table scraps off by way of giving back, and occasionally did things for itself (art and knowledge, providing law so it had to do less work enforcing order through violence) that had accidental minor symbiotic benefits for the people. They rarely even set out to "do good for the people" and when they did, they lacked the consent of the governed or the apparatus and institutions of governance (i.e. executive, beyond legislative and judiciary) to do anything significant.

So until this point, states rose and fell, but the host populations largely went about their lives uninterrupted. It was a matter of "pay the reigning gangster, keep your head down during gang wars, grab something for yourself when possible, try to avoid getting conscripted, jump on the gravy-train entourage if you have the stomach for predation."

The rise and fall of states was basically the rise and fall of individual gangsters and their entourages.

Rome changed this equation, and this was its amazing achievement. It was the first state to actually govern in the modern sense of the word, through the consent of the governed and via an apparatus capable of significant governance.

Yeah, the Greeks had lab-experiment democracy, but it was basically for show and theory. Their system was built on top of slavery and predation/parasitism like every other empire that came before.

Rome by contrast, had some states at its borders begging to be absorbed. Even if they couldn't get full citizenship, they wanted to at least be Roman protectorates. Why?

For the first time in history, a state's main focus went beyond looking out for itself to improving (rather than just protecting) the lot of the host population. Sure, the senators and emperors helped themselves to lavish lifestyles. But they also provided free bread and baths for all. Even slaves could have pretty fantastic lives (which could of course end abruptly as well; during one bloody takeover, the entire household of a senator who got in the way of the takeover guys, including some 4000 slaves, was slaughtered).

The consent of the governed may have been acquired through a ponzi scheme, and bread-bribery and bloody gladiatorial spectacles, but the point is, it was acquired. The state thought it important to do so.

The state also created a governance apparatus that was capable of doing what we would today call "deliberately trying to foster macro-economic growth." In other words, Rome didn't just to carve up the pie (redistribute wealth). It tried to grow the pie faster than the unintegrated host populations could on their own (create wealth). Chief among the mechanisms was the system of Roman roads, and the establishment of urban centers with Roman lifestyles all over, to democratize consumption of the bounty that comparative-advantage economics trade could provide.

The effect of this was that localized economics gave way to large scale comparative-advantage economics. Regions could start to specialize and trade. Sure, international trade goes back to the Bronze Age trade in tin, but the scale of participation in an empire-scale internal economy was unprecedented.

Within the Roman empire, it actually meant something to be inside, beyond being looted periodically. It meant you could go to different corners of the world in safety and do different things based on your talents rather than where you were born. Young and restless men could join the legions, see the world, and hope to retire after a couple of decades in a nice little Roman colonial town.

Read the Asterix comics to get a surprisingly accurate sense of what "Rome" meant. Try in particular "Asterix and the Mansions of the Gods," "Asterix and Caeser's Gift" and "Asterix and the Golden Sickle" to get a sense of the globalized world Rome created (the comics are highly anachronistic and mix up 4-5 centuries worth of cultural references within Julius Caesar's reign, but are very revealing nevertheless).

Sure, they didn't get it fully right:

They didn't understand debasement and inflation well, as others have mentioned.

When the later emperors decided to stop growing the empire, they didn't quite appreciate the extent of the effect it would have on their Ponzi-scheme economic model.

One failure particularly interests me, since it links up to the history of India in an interesting way. The Romans didn't quite know how to manage the balance of trade with the rest of the world. They complained, for instance, about the massive trade deficit with India (and to a lesser extent China, which wasn't as integrated into the global economy at that point) which sucked away gold and silver through unbalanced trade because Rome hadn't thought through an export strategy based on the comparative advantage of the empire as a whole, that could influence the foreign trade away from its natural structure.

It wasn't till the British empire created an unholy trade network that Europe finally figured out how to trade with Asia on favorable terms. The first "balancing" solution was, very roughly speaking: grow opium in India to sell to China, use that silver to buy textiles in Bengal, use the textiles to buy slaves in West Africa to send off on the middle passage, return with profits to England. The Romans were actually properly positioned to orchestrate something like this, since they owned Indian-ocean facing ports, but they never properly realized they needed to, as a matter of survival.

But the failures aside, the BIG point here is the successes. Rome was the first empire that managed to do two things:

1. Really base governance of a substantive and provable 'consent of the governed' principle that extended well beyond the nominal voting citizenry, rather than 'fear of the gangster'
2. Really add enough value through governance to grow beyond being a predatory/parasitic state, with value added at least temporarily exceeding value extracted. A grow-pie/divide-pie state instead of a pure divide-pie state.

But of course there were fatal flaws, most of them traceable to mechanisms Augustus put in place right at the birth of the empire.

Hence my "death by birth defect" theory. The defects were strong enough, and the governance mechanisms rudimentary enough, that you might even call it a Frankenstein state that never got to "living" at all, but I think that is too harsh a judgment. During the brief heyday of Pax Romana, this was a legitimate, organic state, not a Frankenstein's monster state.

Empires have continued to evolve since then, but the evolution is still not done. We've eliminated most "birth defects" in modern empires, but we still haven't conquered imperial infectious diseases, let alone imperial diseases of old age. Japan though, might be the first example of a state that will die purely out of old age, along with its aging citizens. So we've come a long way in figuring out governance.

Sadly, America, the dominant empire of today, is still making governance mistakes of the Roman variety. Mistakes that even the British empire managed to avoid. From entitlement Ponzi schemes to drastic underestimation of the effect of the value of the slavery-and-smallpox trust fund on today's macroeconomics, America has both diseases and birth defects. Still, we've come a long way, and I have hope.

The miracle of Rome is not that it died, but that it managed to actually live well for at least a couple of centuries.

End of reign of emperor Trajan is usually considered the zenith of the Roman Empire. Trajan as the emperor, who added the last significant conquests to the Roman empire, those being the province of Dacia onnthr northern bank of the Danube, and lands in Mesopotamia and beyond, stretching all the way to the Persian gulf and the kaspian sea.

Imagine that! At its peak, the Roman Empire stretched Al the way from Britain to the kaspian sea. That was something, really!

BTW, trajan's idea was to completely conquer the Persian empire, and then move on to India, immigrating Alexander the great. Unfortunately he died before he could go on that campaign, but if he had succeeded, he would be the first one to unite Europe and India and everything in between. That would have been amazing.

Here's a book that goes into more detail of the planning of the cities of the Roman empire, which also describes the lives of the Romans that lived in them. (Wine franchises! Who knew?)
City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction: David Macaulay: 9780395349229: Amazon.com: Books

The city starts with the selection of an area, so local villages are relocated (sometimes receiving in-city property) and the engineers lay out the city's parameters and figure out where the drinking water will becoming from. Soldiers from the local battalions, off-duty from wars or between-duties are used for road building and construction work. They will be paid in part with housing in the city that will be theirs and their family's. Places for the wealthy, the markets, the temple, the baths, and so forth are planned out, as is the infrastructure, the water and the sewers and the walls that will protect the city as it grows, and then when it's filled, protect the farmlands outside from urban sprawl.

As the city is populated, there will be many trades, with their masters, servants, apprentices. Merchants will have their markets in designated areas. A wealthy wine merchant may set up a number of stalls in the various markets, by the gym, near the temple and rent the spaces and provide the goods. His private home will house slaves and servants, and have its own water system. Lesser tradesmen may live with their wives and children in apartment buildings that have a shared toilet room on the ground floor (with a sponge on a stick in soapy water for everyone to wipe his or her bottom). Merchants' deliveries are made at night, so that the streets are open to pedestrians and limited chariots of officials and dignitaries. Families eat at home or the local tavern. There are bakers and local industries, outlying villages and slums outside the city wall. Thanks to the sewer system, the city is cleaner than villages or what followed after the Roman Empire, and because the straight streets and road planning, along with the placement of soldiers living throughout the town and used for police duty, crime stays down. Everyone living in the city is expected to be involved in some sort of trade or industry, to have some skill set to have place in society, even the slaves. (The book doesn't mention who cleans the toilets or sweeps the street, if the city owned the slaves or the jobs were put out on contract and a slave owned had his do the job, or however.)

Another reference I suggest is the Letters of Pliny the Younger (which includes his sitting and reading while Mt. Vesuvius throws out ash). In some of his letters, Pliny the Younger wrote about attending poetry recitals, so there were probably many gatherings of friends and such getting together much as people did before movies, radio and television: talking to each other; inviting people over for dinner and book clubs; playing games at the local tavern; suffering and/or enjoying music recitals, puppet plays, and other amusements. Another thing that appears in his letters is the grief of his young wife's death. (Childbirth. He lamented that she was too young.) His letters are on-line if you want to read them. (He really was not looking forward to a particular poetry recital.)

Personal joys and sorrows, pride and fear, love and loathing would have gone on in Rome, just as it always has. Women would have had house and other industries (weaving, baking, etc.), in some case would have taken on some business responsibilities (you don't want to mess with Mrs. Wine Merchant), and a few would have had some voice in the local politics (money always talks).

I think Dr Who in "The Fires of Pompeii" had family living right: "Doctor Who" The Fires of Pompeii (TV Episode 2008)

(Now instead of one book, you have two and a show to watch! ("City," by the way, is beautifully illustrated and is written on an upper elementary school level, so it's a relatively fast and very enjoyable read.)

We have almost no statistics for anything in the Roman world although we know that they had at least some of them.

To show the variation in guesswork, there is one expert on Roman Britain who has estimated the population as anything from five to nine million, whilst others guess a million.

Average wealth is meaningless when a handful of multi billionaires owned vast landed estates yet a quarter of the population were slaves.

The third century AD saw massive inflation of prices. Coins which in AD200 had been almost pure silver and thus worth their bullion value were by 300 just base metal with a thin silver wash. Each new emperor ordered the exchange of the coins of his predecessor and issued his own, always with less silver. Traders knew this and wanted more of them, stoking inflation. Diocletian issued an Edict of Maximum Prices which survives, but it failed to stop inflation.

So the price of anything depends on when.

Literacy was probably higher than many expect. The army was totally literate as letters from Vindolanda in northern Britain and El Djem in Algeria show. You needed regular levels of literacy to run a massive army.

The British empire spanned 25% (a quarter of earths landmass) and ruled over an estimated 458 million people.

At it’s peak (in 1922) it was the largest empire in human history

It lasted from 1601 to 1997 when the last colony (i.e. Hong Kong) was surrendered to the Chinese when the 99 year lease expired.

The Fall of the Roman Empire occurred in several stages over hundreds of years. It did not finally fully fall until the conquest of the Eastern Empire vestige of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 ACE.

The Western Empire was moved from Rome to several other sites in Western Europe. It continued to exist as The Holy Roman Empire until the beginning of the 19th century ACE.

I doubt that anyone within the Roman Empire fully understood why it declined and continued not to do so.

However, once Rome had reached its’ greatest extent, it began to decline because of poor leadership decisions, it’s growing inability to afford and thus maintain what it held. A sequence of occurrences that have afflicted every other Empire in history and is now beginning to also affect the American Hegemony.

During the kingdom they were one of the weakest. During the republic they rivaled and then conquered the Carthaginians. The diadochi kingdoms at one point could have rivaled Rome but were wavering in the strength, especially as they fought one another. During the empire the parthian and sassanid empire rivalled them for dominance. During the Byzantine empire they were rivaled by the Sassanids, the Carolingians, the spanish, holy roman empire, the Rashidun caliphate, the Seljuks, crusader states and finally, the Ottomans.

And this entire time they were rivalled by the various chinese kingdoms and empires when China wasn’t in a warring states period or civil war.

It was not “evil” per se. It exploited its provinces for the economical benefit of Italy and to secure power among the inhabitants of the capital, but it also provided the subjugated peoples with technology and laws that brought their civilizations into a new stage of progress. All the statements from this famous scene from “The Life of Brian” are factual (time stamp 0:40):

Rome created a first (partial) European unity under a common language, which was essential for the emergence of an international community of scholars both in the humanities and sciences during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Considering what Europe has Rome to thank for, it would be ungrateful to call it “evil”. Such a characterisation would be quite simplistic and naive anyway for a historical phenomenon of such longevity and magnitude.