Why did Rome disappear?

>>3097863

They really didn't. Rome is still a very powerful city.

>>3097863
They cucked themselves with Christianity. The closest thing to Rome today is the Vatican, that's pretty much what it looked like before it fell.

The states decided to call the region "Italy" after the fall. So that's what it's called. It's the same type of name change that Iran underwent from being Persia.

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>>3097863
Western rome fell apart because of the dissolution of a purely Roman Military and instead a military filled with German Barbarians and merchants. This came at a time with the Huns made their way through Europe, completely ravaging the festering corpse of the In-Name-Only Roman Empire.

The Eastern Roman Empire fell because of all the resources and money they spent finally defeating the Persians left them wide open for the Arab invasions. After the Arab conquests, The Eastern Roman Empire ceased to be Roman and instead became thoroughly Byzantine aka: Greeks LARPing as Romans.

>>3097985
*mercenaries
Not Merchants

>>3097985
That was a very gradual process and more the result of economic and political decline more than anything. It doesn't matter if you have foreign mercenaries or a civilian warrior culture, if you can't pay your troops, you can't defend you land.

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>>3097863
It was a brittle, corrupt system unable to keep pace with the changing times.

Their once robust system of romanization, where they turned yesterday's conquered peoples into tomorrow's citizens, had long since broken down by the 5th century and Germanics were instead kept as permanent second class citizens and disposable soldiers, as no sane Roman wanted to enlist in the Russian roulette that was the military because you stood a pretty decent chance of being executed as a traitor just because your general was an egomaniac with a messiah complex who decided to rebel and seize his chance at "Godhood."

The constant civil wars destroyed the interconnected economy and forced the urban poor to flee into the countryside, selling their bodies and labor to rural manor-lords in exchange for a plot of land and a shack to call their own. These started happening well before the Christian religion became widespread, and didn't stop until the court of the Western Roman Emperor was bankrupt and without an army, and the only people who still had money were the people that the Romans were paying to kill each other, who had nothing but bitter memories of Rome, no stake in the system, and no good cultural reason to preserve it.

In many ways the end of the Roman Empire was a necessity. They had been preserving a martial culture for so long that they didn't have anybody to be "martial" to, except of course their own creditors. They ruined vast ecosystems in southern Europe, Asia Minor, and North Africa, just to feed their addiction to mindless slaughter in the arena, and once they ran out of foreign cultures to pillage, they turned on each other, their society fractured, and in the ashes a new culture arose which wasn't mindlessly obsessed with the slaughter, and the profits to be made from it.

>>3097863
The Romans still exist in this world.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qmFhsts8WC4

Rome may have officially lasted until the finally took Byzantium, but I think it truly in spirit died when it became an empire.

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I'm not even going to look through the thread but I'm assuming the replies are full of outdated 19th century historiography like thinking the Roman army had devolved into a rabble of Germanic mercenaries and that the eastern Empire stops being Roman after some arbitrary point in time

WHY do people on here constantly pontificate and lecture on subjects they have such amateur knowledge of

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>>3098142
>when it became an empire
Do you mean the Principate or the Dominate?

Even the mid to late Republic was an Empire in the traditional sense.

G*rmans

>>3097863
>the roman empire is gone and it's culture is never coming back
I can't deal with this feel.

>>3098194
It's sadly true.
The g*ermans have always been destructors of civilization.
It's in their blood.
They caused the collapse of the Roman Empire which was the coolest Empire in history in my opinion.

>>3097897
>le Edward Gibbon meme

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>>3098151
>WHY do people on here constantly
why do you shitpost instead of contribute to the discussion?

>>3098241
What fucking discussion. Anon is right. It's just people regurgitating the same old Gibbonian myths and maybe something they picked up from playing Total War.

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>>3098076
also most people forget about diseases which ravaged the empire
and the disastrous financial crisis of the 3rd century

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>>3098252
>What fucking discussion. Anon is right. It's just people regurgitating the same old Gibbonian myths and maybe something they picked up from playing Total War.
Come now, lad, where's your sense of sportsmanship? You're looking at it all the wrong way.

We are all Sisyphus, the Greek king condemned by fate to push a boulder up a hill every day, just to turn around and find another boulder waiting for him at the base of the hill. We have our own boulders the face, all we can change is our attitudes, either A:cry some more and be miserable about it, or B: learn to fucking love pushing those boulders up a hill every day. Even if you have to lie to yourself in the beginning.

Think of all those retarded discussions you could be deftly crushing right now. Think about how satisfying it is to get somebody to STFU about shit they know nothing about. Learn to love being cruel with facts and logic and 4chan becomes a magical place.

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>>3098253
The Antonine plague accelerated the fall in two key ways:

Imperial coffers were depleted, the tax-base was a fraction of its former size, and Commodus was busy blowing the state's rainy day fund on the most lavish and decadent coliseum displays the Roman world would ever know.

The heavily centralized nature of the Roman economy meant that virtually all of the economic recovery in the post-plague rebound concentrated into the hands of extremely powerful elite, who were also generals in the military and dreamed of being the second coming of Julius Caesar.

After Commodus's death, two weak emperors in rapid succession resulted in the military more or less taking over the government. They held absolute power for the span of a very weak dynasty, which precipitated other generals "pulling a Julius" and sparking the crisis of the 3rd century, a period defined by widespread social strife and civil war.

>>3098176

I suppose the late republic is when it started dying, actually. Caesar was just the last nail in the coffin.

>>3097863
I heard an interesting theory the child emperors had a big hand in the empire's fall. Essentially, the dominate's massive bureaucracy required a strong, capable, adult emperor to personally run it, and when child emperors became common essentially by accident, the bureaucracy slowly broke apart as competing power blocks sought to control it. Not only did this mean more civil wars, but it meant that the bureaucracy became less and less capable of collecting taxes.

>tfw Rome didn't take over the whole world

>>3098151
not a very educational post

>>3097985
>Greeks LARPing as Romans
"Greeks LARPing as Romans" You are a hoot, Anon!

>>3098826
By the end of Heraclius' reign, whatever was left of the Roman psyche was gone
They spent everything they had to defeat the Persians and then they got curbstomped by the Arabs
They even referred to themselves as Greek after this point.

>>3098479
It also meant that women got to run the show via children Emperors.

It's no surprise that the shit show Elagabalus' mother and grandmother put on was followed by the crisis of the 3rd century

>>3098500
That was impossible at that time

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>>3097863
you need to watch the old 'Neux to understand the big picture, my man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh7rdCYCQ_U

>>3097863
>Why don't we have a United States of Rome today?

We do, it's called the United States of America

>>3097863
Because we have AngloAmerica!
A nation in possession of both a glorious Imperium and a prosperous (and fucking amazing) Republic.

>>3098228
what's wrong with Gibbon

>>3098958
all confirmation bias, for example many civil wars and defeats against invaders were unrelated to a failure to pay troops

he is doing the complete opposite of looking at the big picture, it would be the equivalent of an SJW blaming the fall of rome on lack of diversity and using white male emperors as proof

>>3098866

>whatever was left of the Roman psyche was gone

Except for Roman law, Greco-Roman literature, poetry, and Greco-Roman mythology, high standards of education, the unbroken succession of Emperors, their Christian identity, the senate, military tactics, etc.

>They spent everything they had to defeat the Persians and then they got curbstomped by the Arabs

I don't see what this has to do with them somehow losing the things that made them Roman, but while we're on the subject if you think the Romans were curbstomped by the Arabs, you should keep in mind that the Persians were utterly annihilated by them.

>They even referred to themselves as Greek after this point.

That is totally wrong, they did not rediscover their pride in being Greek until many centuries afterwards. The term Hellene was still regarded as a pejorative for pagan Greeks during this period. They may have stopped speaking Latin, but Greek had been the language of the majority in the East since before the Roman Empire. That had never changed.

>>3097863
Petty infighting and plagues did the west in.

The sack of Constantinople in 1204 sent the east into a death spiral

>>3100482
Apparently the last people to call themselves romans lived on islands of the coast of turkey.