What was Rome's biggest mistake?

honestly depends on the era
>Republican
not listening to the Gracchi Brothers
>Empire
Tie between not reforming the Army structure to lessen the chance of succession battles and not dispersing immigrating barbarian tribes so they weren't concentrated in one region, along with integrating them properly.
and at all times for all eternity, Christianity

letting Goths into the empire.

Commodus

Constantine didn't convert till his deathbed, he never made it an offical only faith, numb nuts

>implying Venice wasn't just the taxi driver
>implying the blame isn't on the crusader leaders and the deposed Emperor
>implying Venice didn't meet with the Emperor and try to make a deal, only for Crusaders to run in and go 'REEEEEEEEEE'

They just wanted someone to pay the fare

t.Byziboo that is annoyed the positive relationship between Venice and ERE is ignored due to 'MUH 4TH CRUSADE'

Removing the Altar of Victory from the senate house

1)Stopped it being in opposition to the state
2)More taxes

Hi gibbon
Migrations helped restock the agricultual society and lifeblood. Most tribes just wanted food and shelter (due to a mini ice age). Real issue was the civil wars and people fucking up the handling of barbarian groups (abusing, stealing children, not disarming them)

Literally these + Vespasian not throttling Domitian

Why did Venice send armies to the sack the Byzantine Empire in the 4th crusade? Wasn't the whole crusade thing about trying to reclaim holy lands and spread Christianity?

Did Byzantine already fall to the Ottomans in the 4th Crusade or am I missing something?

After quick look up apparently Venice sent armies to reclaim Jerusalem, they met with this guy in Byzantine who claimed his father was deposed and they did a deal, sacked and conquered Constaninople because guy was killed and had no support, then they went home and Byzantine took back their capital.

Pointless and stupid excursion all around?

They didn't send armies.

Basically:
1)Crusaders book Venice to go to egypt. Tell everyone it's to the holy land to trick the muslims
2)Half the crusade goes to the holy land by alternative means
3)Crusaders can't pay venetians
4)Venice says 'okay, support us by helping us intimidate a few towns and we'll call it even'
5)Crusaders fuck that up by going 'psst, we're not gonna fight you' to Zara
6)Zara gets sacked anyway
7)Angry pope.jpg (Zara was christian)
8)Head off to corfu
9)A deposed Byzantine emperor that the German Emperor was related to, who has contacts in the Crusader army turns up, along with some Germans and goes 'aaaay. Restore me and you'll get all the money'
10)Sail to Constantinople, beat up the old Emperor, install the new
11)Guy doesn't have money
12)New Emperor gets deposed
13)Doge tries to negotiate with the new new emperor, Crusades do a charage at the Emperor to try to capture him half way through
14)Crusaders get drunk and burn down half the city because they saw a mosque for traders
15)Byzantine Empire starts reaching out to Venice's rivals for help
16)Doge is upshit creek without a paddle. Middle of a hostile empire, losing trade and still hasn't been paid for the fleet the crusaders ordered
17)Venice agrees to help the Crusaders sack the city
18)Constantinople is sacked, Latin Empire established, Venice takes Corfu and Crete

A massive accident that should never had happened, yeah

>greeklarper

Killing Germanicus

>Killing Nero
Nero killed himself because he thought he was going to be killed. In actuality, the senate venerated his bloodline too much to kill him, and in fact when soldiers found Nero bleeding to death, they tried to save him.

Not establishing a clear line of succession for the emperorship and separating military power from political power.

Ultimately, the civil wars caused by the above destroyed Rome in the long run. All other issues stemmed from that root.

Thank you. You are a ray of light among the cancer.

>The Senate's unwillingness to go along with certain land reforms
>Not establishing any formal method of succession

And practically everything about the army
>Having their pay come directly from their generals/the emperor
>Ridiculous wage inflation under the Severans
>The fact that eventually every legion was a non-Roman legion did nothing to help engender loyalty to Rome itself

Creating a professional standing army without having some kind of mechanism in place to keep said standing army from either running amok at will or extorting the rest of the polity to not run amok at will.

Not having a communist revolution lead by the Gracchi brothers

so he killed himself as to not be killed?

Normalizing degenerate Hellenistic influences.

Constantine wasnt christian. He worshiped Sol Invictus.
Also christianity destroying Rome is a meme.

elagabalus not being eternal empress

>Constantine wasnt christian
Literally a Christian saint.

Nero thought he was going to be killed (since it was pretty normal), so he decided to fall on his sword like a true Roman.

Of course, he couldn't do it, and had someone else do the deed.

So is the Buddha

No, but Constantine definitely converted and is venerated as a saint.

Fuck off Constantine Dildopolis

>They just wanted someone to pay the fare
Venetians talked the Crusaders into sacking a Catholic city for them, for fuck's sake. That was their fare.

I don't know. I've heard that the Gracchi brothers were pretty bad themselves, such as breaking traditions while doing stuff and were the first to use mob violence against their opponents.

Stop

Immigrants, giving citizenship to everyone in roman territory, race mixing, creating the welfare state... basically just thinking they were intelligent but in reality becoming cucked.

Letting generals be the legions source of income, making them loyal to their general rather than Rome. Also the Gracchi

Constantine undoing the Tetrarchy. Diocletian had finally found a way to keep the empire stable, and then he had to go and ruin it all wanting to control the whole thing himself.

That shit broke down almost as soon as Diocletian stepped away from it

He was right, as much as he was harsh.

At last I truly see the evil ways of the Venetian

Dubs don't lie

>The Senate's unwillingness to go along with certain land reforms
Probably the single largest determiner of the problem. Romans decided that it was just cheaper to put all the now landless poor on the bread dole.
>Not establishing any formal method of succession
How could they do that when their government was ostensibly a Republic and the first citizen was merely a preserver of the old ways?

>>Having their pay come directly from their generals/the emperor
The state paid the soldier's wages and provided their equipment and training, it was up to the generals to secure for them a retirement package. More successful generals either granted their soldiers conquest booty or plots of land and could make a humongous difference in their post-military quality of life. It was the veteran's pension that the state refused to support, and what made soldiers more loyal to their general than to the government.

>>Ridiculous wage inflation under the Severans
By the time of the Severans Rome had already run out of people to plunder, and was merely prolonging the inevitable. They needed a foreign infusion of capital to keep their economy running, and there just weren't any more around worth the cost of invading and occupying.

>>The fact that eventually every legion was a non-Roman legion
that's actually a misconception. The armies of Aetius Flavius had an equal proportion of allies and state soldiers as the armies of Scipio Africanus. The difference is that Scipio's army consisted of people who were in the process of being romanized, and were already given a stake in the system through partial citizenship and weren't keen on undoing all the work that they had already invested into becoming a part of Rome. Germanics, meanwhile, were treated like permanent second class citizens, and had been in a state of near continuous exploitation since migrating into Roman territory, so when they revolted they did so having absolutely no love for the Roman state.

I'm someone who actually studied this shit at uni instead of meming.

Too bad people don't do it more often, instead of 'aaaaay, lets repeat dead historical memery'

He still wasn't Christian

Converted on his death bed to the Arian heresy

Not really.

It was more
'Hey, help us threaten this place that owes us shit'
'k'
*gets there, Crusaders proceed to undermind the venetians and force the siege to happen by going 'lol, we wouldn't fight you' to Zara*

Besides, Zara didn't cover the cost of the fleet.

>ffs please just pay us, we were risking fucking up our trade for this
>ends up having to help dismanatle their main trade partner and get demonised by crusaders going 'it wasn't us we wuz good boys'

>'evil'

>having two, often contradictory, consuls
>giving proconsuls and praetors imperium
>Catullus
>extending citizenship
>welfare

fucking commie

>extending citizenship

This was a net positive though

Why was the post this refered to deleted?

Extending citizenship to people in conquered territory was something Rome did almost as soon as they became a force in the world.

>Stilicho single handedly saves the Empire
>Honorius has him killed in a fit of autistic rage

>Aetius single handedly saves the Empire
>Valentinian III kills him in a fit of autistic rage

>Belisarius single handedly saves the Empire
>Justinian fucks his wife in a fit of autistic lust

Being a Late Roman General was suffering

>x empire fell because of current things I don't like

Tired of this retarded meme. Go back to /pol/

Losing Aurelian and ending up with Diocletian about 10 years later.

/pol/

/cuck/

that actually happened a lot in ancient rome

>Aetius
>Of Scythian, potentially Gothic descent

>Stilicho
>Of Vandilic descent

Reminder the "barbarians" were some of Rome's most capable by the late empire.

Rome didn't make any mistakes. Almost every single thing they did was correct.

>The immigrants were white
>some how calling this out calls out /pol/
reddit pls

Being a corrupt, oligarchic hell hole with most of its population depending on bread and Circus provided by a said shitty State.

Didn't he have his trap wife Sporus do it?

>net positive
No, the only positive was that it allowed the state to collect taxes from more people. It's actually counter productive because it added even more people to Roman welfare state.

On top of that, it completely dissolved what it meant to be a Roman. Roman identity has much more to do with values like virtus, gravitas, and veritas than it has to do with being born in Rome or a Roman province.

Giving in to degeneration

Not letting Germanicus finish the job. Imagine a world where Germans are as limited as modern Celts.

Define

Killing Caesar.
Not killing Tiberius and co

Persecuting Christians

Refute it.

Best post ITT

What a fucking retard.

This.

The Praetorians murdering Pertinax. One of the very few Emperors to try to increase the silver content of the currency, recognising that rampant inflation would lead to ruin.

Retarded reforms of Diocletian
Even though they were somewhat necessary it ruined empire by starting feudal society.
Bonus: Ambrose cucking emperor so hard that europe falls under Christian dominance.
Also everyone talking about immigrants ruining empire, Rome always integrated immigrants since they become a power. One of reasons what ruined empire was not immigrants but it was uncontrolled immigrants.

I'd say immigrants, but because of other reasons other than "outsiders muddling pure Roman blood". At the beginning, when the Romans started expanding in earnest, they had a bona fide way of integrating other cultures: diluting the populace into Rome in general, getting rid of local centers of power like chieftains and making the populace follow Roman rule, and getting swords out of the people's hands, calling upon them for military service as auxiliaries forces of the Legions instead of leaving local forces to garrison their home villages, where they could be swayed to revolt easier and vie for autonomy. When the Goths were settled without the Romans having done any of this, it started the start of the decline in my humble opinion.

fuck off /pol/. I get so pissed off by these fucking stormweenies who shit up this whole board. Veeky Forums is supposed to be a place of intelligent posters, not your fucking scum and shitty sociopolitical views

There's a fine line between "immigrants" and "invaders". The Romans very wisely took great steps to break up any incoming tribe or cultural group, completely depriving them of any heirarchy, structure, or leadership, and making sure they were distributed far away enough from each other that they would be totally absorbed by the Greco-Roman population of the empire. This policy failed for many reasons later in the empire, and was undoubtedly a factor in its fall.

Yes i agree they failed to integrate goths

Their mothers were Germans, so not the important part!

Is that bird shit or a tears

Look man,I'm trying to make an "intelligent" post. It's a given fact that Romans dismantled the political systems of the people they tried to integrate. What I'm saying is basically what said.
At a certain point, with the invasion of the Goths, the Romans decided that they wouldn't do it anymore, which led to the Gothic community being essentially a subculture of the Roman empire with its own power structures, allowing them to hold sway in the Empire's decisions through sheer presence of military might. It's the same premise which allowed Gaius Marius, Sulla, or Julius Caesar to take control of Rome, the only difference being, these people were culturally different from their Roman counterparts, meaning that the average Roman wouldn't be as ready to accept their foreign rule as they would another citizen's.

I get that Valentinian III was a creepy paranoid dick but why did Honorius kill Stilicho?

You have to understand that Honorius is what happens when you let a literal retard - and I mean an actual fucking retard - run a whole empire. The guy was just absolutely fucking spastic. He was a dumb cowardly pathetic mistake of a human being who shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near any kind of power.

This.

The Goths were generally in control and the majority of the legions were manned by Goths. Honorius decided the best way to deal with the Goths? Kill the wives and children of the Gothic soldiers living in Illyria.

Suprise surprise this leads to the Gothic uprising that saw Rome get sacked.

Marcus Aurelius naming Commodus his successor to the Empire

This. Nothing could hold the disparate regions of Rome together quite like the imperial cult.

Not conquering Germania for the glory of Rome

I mean honestly, I can see why he did it. Up to that point, the line of imperial succession had been wonky at best, with people naming random heirs since they didn't have sons of their own. Marcus Aurelius just tried to bring a bit more of stability and rationale to the process rather than having to pick among several eligible and ambitious successors that may squabble and plot after his death.

Making Commodus emperor instead of keeping the adoption system.

>Roman identity

I've been listening to A History of Rome and frankly, the Empire becomes a mess after Hadrian dies and it's hard to stay interested anymore. Everything between the founding and Hadrian had been captivating, interesting stuff but then you get to years of the 5, 6 emperors, the splitting of the empire, the decline of Rome as the relevant center of the Empire, the Germanic migrations... the writing is on the wall. Then you get that utter fucking weirdo that is Elagabulus, at that point you know it's over.
Commodus was a mistake, but Aurelius really was the beginning of the end.

Picking up where Babylon left off.