What brought down this beauty? Could it have survived if it stayed a republic?

Christfaggotry.

This. Cuckstrianity fucked this region of the world for ~1,200 years, until the European religious wars of the seventeenth century.

Refugees.

No seriously. Rome let in a ton of germanic tribes that were refugees and treated them like shit even though they put many germanics on their payroll. Big suprise. Soldiers don't like being treated like shit, and they ravage the land under new germanic kings in frustration.

Also exacerbates the problem when the germanics are generals and

>transition from republic to empire was not chief among them.
kinda feel it was

With the Republic there was at least a sense of unity among them even though it was strained

With the empire it was every family for itself constantly fighting over one another for control of Rome weakening it from the inside out.

This definitely. It was only until I think around the 1800s that people realized that inflation was something that occurred, and there are instances where a local area would just fucking collapse because there was an incredible influx of gold. An example being after the first Jewish-Roman war when the Legions found large staches of gold after sacking Jerusalem and when they went and spent all of it, the area's economy fucking went crazy and inflation skyrocketed.

Maybe a good economy would have saved it but they mostly paid their monstrous military with land and slaves

neither are very renewable so they kept having to conquer and when stretched thin turned to conquer each other for them.

wonder why didn't they prioritize colonizing Germania that way.

Germany is historically known for not having the best land, Just a lot of easily fortified hills and mountains (which explains most of German history).

>What brought down this beauty?
You already know the answer

It was on the verge of collapse because of the Senate. The empire lasted for 1,500 years, with 1000 years of them Rome was either the largest/most powerful state or one of being that

>sense of unity
Augustus assumed sole power because Rome came off the heels of 50 years of war that nearly split the empire

blaming inflation is an even worse meme than blaming the inherently militarized nature of the Roman economy, which actually has a lot of truth to it (ever wonder why their economy gradually spiraled into disaster within a few decades of conquering the Dacians, the last peoples in Europe worth conquering?) Rome suffered from chronic currency issues throughout its history but only experienced crippling hyperinflation during a reigns of a few of the barracks Emperors (and even then for only a few years) but the currency was at its most stable after the reforms of Constantine, whose monetary policy would set the standard for the next 1,000 years of money history.

A worthy parallel is to the slave economies of the antebellum American south: the rapid depletion of the soil forced them to adopt an aggressive pro-growth strategy where people living in old areas maintained their lifestyle by acting as middle men exporting slaves to new states out west. They knew their goose was cooked when Lincoln was elected because he specifically ran as a compromise moderate preserving slavery in already existing slave states while preventing its spread to new states. They seceded knowing that such an arrangement would doom their society.

>Western Empire
An inability to enforce its borders
>Eastern Empire
Being sacked by the Turks

>Could it have survived if it stayed a republic?
Towards the end the Republic was a bloated, corrupt, dysfunctional mess, which was basically allowing a small cadre of elites to pilfer the entire economy, drive landowners into the ranks of urban and suburban poor, and rig the economy in their favor using slaves and a pay-to-play jucidiary system.

It would have needed complete top-to-bottom reform and some form of large scale capital redistribution, which given the strength that conservatives disproportionately wielded in their system, made it a vanishingly unlikely event. Their solution (which we now call "empire") was to permanently militarize their economy and set soldiers as a privileged class above the civilians.

When they ran out of foreign capital to infuse into their economy, they had no one left to use that massive military juggernaut on but each other.

immigrants, overreaching government programs, and taxation

"mechanisms to fight against inflation"
you mean just not devaluing your currency intentionally to hoard wealth while maintaining the guise of economic stability and wealth to your citizens, a lot like western countries are doing today? Why can't we learn? fiat currencies are disgusting and economists are retarded, evil, or both

>An inability to enforce its borders
Rome's solution was to settle migrants along borders that had long grown fallow, in essence 'renting' empty land in exchange for policing the borders and providing a quota of soldiers for the army, called foederati, or federates.

This is how Rome had worked for most of its history: yesterday's conquered people are today's auxiliaries, and tomorrow's legionaries. From its very earliest history Rome was a haven town filled with low-lifes, murderers, thieves, and debt-dodgers all looking to escape their past and start a new life, and the reason it kept growing (unlike the hellenistic city states) was this continuous infusion of new blood into their economy, which is what allowed them to wage total wars and weather brutal losses. For example, the Severan dynasty was a period where the empire was being held together by soldiers from Pannonia (the modern day Balkans).

The problem towards the end was that the system had become so rigged in favor of a distant elite that rather than the settlers Romanizing, they were treated as permanent second class citizens and cannon fodder. This was also not unusual in Roman history, neither was the inevitable revolt that comes from pushing people around for about a generation or two.

Except this time, after so many decades of unrelenting civil wars and power struggles, Rome wasn't in a position, militarily or economically, to contain the revolts. No Italian wanted to join the military where he stood a very high chance of being executed as a traitor because he was assigned to the wrong general, who was an egotistical maniac who thought that he was a literal god and tried to usurp the throne. And in any event their new German masters cut taxes and relieved them of the burdensome central government that Rome had become, and Italy flourished until the Byzantines burned it all to the ground reconquering it.

>Why can't we learn? fiat currencies are disgusting and economists are retarded, evil, or both
At no point did Rome ever have a fiat currency, nor did it ever issue notes in the public trust. Theirs was a far more primitive system based around precious metals which was, in essence, "whoever has the has the gold makes the rules and puts his face on the money to prove it."

Fiat currency is far more stable than currency based on shiny metal rocks.

it's false stability, and they did the same thing as giving out notes, remove the precious metals replacing them with junk

>it's false stability,
Systems based around precious metals were even more unstable, prone to massive, crippling swings in the market that could render vast swathes of the populace impoverished and restive. And despite death penalties for counterfeiters, it's rampant when the actual token that you're passing around has value, as opposed to a bank note which is notoriously difficult to replicate precisely.

lol you're a dumbass

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that doesn't mean they were entirely or even mostly living off wealth made from plunder like "conquest-based economy" implies.

The Marian reforms were a mistake.

No, but these conquests acted as a form of stimulus, a shot in the arm of the economy in the form of foreign booty divided up among the soldiers and integrated into domestic markets, to be spent and invested.

By the time of Marcus Aurelius, they were having to embark on foreign conquest just to break even. After that, the only places left unpilfered were dirt poor Germans and Persians who were simply not worth the cost to conquer. From that point on the Romans had no one left to wage war on but themselves.

>ITT not knowing the difference between republic and res publica
If you think Rome ever was a republic that stopped existing in 27 BC or so you are anachronistic idiots.

Yeah except that shit never happened. They enrolled more and more tribes as soldiers; then they rebelled again again (like Roman armies did before, again and again). That shit with the refugees is /pol/tarded fiction. Stop reading Breitbart and once open a book written by a historian.

>inb4 muh Gothic Wars
yeah sure Roman collapsed in the 4th century, right?

Throughout its history they called themselves the SPQR, Senātus Populus que Rōmānus, The Senate and People of Rome.

The distinction between Republic and Empire is a modern invention because it serves as a useful distinction. By the standards of the ancients Augustus was a great preserver of the old ways, the first citizen doing his duty to protect the public government from the scourge of change, and the SPQR went on being the SPQR.

In practice, Augustus wielded a disproportionate percentage of the entire economy, in essence buying out the public government and preserving it as a facade for hard-nosed Romans who competed among themselves to see who was the more conservative and traditionalist, and still thought of themselves as "free men". From this moment on, Roman government had been profoundly altered, even if the Romans were too blinded by pride and hypocrisy to notice.

Women being taken seriously in politics, multiculturalism, and savages flooding in.

>Women being taken seriously in politics,
Pic related, it's a romanticized painting of an event taking place at the dawn of Roman history: women wielding social authority to compel their Sabine fathers and Roman husbands into accepting peace terms.

It happened throughout their history. Blaming it for the fall is retarded. Roman women generally had it much better than women in any other culture at the time.

> tfw the most boring branch of religon became dominent

Damn, doomed to fail from the start...

1200+ years is a damn good run. Double that if you include the Byzantines as Romans.

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