What was the breaking point for Roman Empire when the degeneracy went rampart?

I'm pleased to hear that enough people recognize that this was a huge cause of Roman collapse.

The thing is, when people talk of the Roman Empire's collapse, it's worth also noting that it was never all that stable. Sure it spread wide and had infrastructure that turned it into a well operated, successful giant, but instability was existent straight from the get go. The Empire itself began after a time of instability of the Republic which itself began from a time of instability dealing with Etruscan tyrants and Celtic invaders.

Nope, just attack them a couple of times

One thing that bother me is that mongoloids such as huns, mongols and turkics did many things to caucasian people and got away with it

Their people didnt suffer like they should have been

instability is a buzzword. The thing was designed to do all of that, and it was a success of the system

there are three things that caused Rome to fall for good, because it wasn't Germans at the gates and Christianity were not going to do it on their own.

-two plagues that literally killed off half the empire's population, tanking the economic growth, agricultural and industrial output and military reserves

-coin minting leading to devaluation, devaluation leading to inflation, absolutely no knowledge of tools or practices to correct inflation

-the Caracalla edict made citizenship trivial and taxation inefficient and abusive, leading to a progressive loss of trust and loyalty from the empire's subjects to the central government of Rome, and local land owners becoming more and more powerful, leading to Feudalism.

Rome could have survived German invasion, Rome could have even succeeded at Romanizing the Goths as they did the Gauls and Iberians, Rome could have transitioned to Christianity and made it compatible with Roman values(which it mostly was, actually), but Rome could not survive all of the above plus desperate political strife. It took the entire world to come down on them.

Analysis literally taken straight from the 1700s, well done you moron.

No one takes Gibbon seriously anymore, user.

Not in the sense that they conserved the old way of life.

It's nonsense to talk about "social conservatism" when talking about ancient societies because they all were

you don't just pack your people into carts and start marching west for fun

quote your faglord professors if im wrong. Literally a fact, you can even see the parallels in banana republics and christian dictatorships. In fact, every piece of primary documents agrees with his assessments.

If you honestly think what an 18th century writer thinks histiography is with actual history from the perspective on that field, being actually valid, you are dumb.

When Augustus failed to implement a method of imperial succession other than just giving it to your son.

The Roman Empire itself is a product of degeneracy and failure. Roman Republic > Roman Empire

>if you have a shred of intellectual merit that others agree with then they are dumb
I don't see any quotes from your paper-thin argument. The ones I read and heard boil it down to a mix of Great Hektor killed them all, bullied the caucases, and they ran out of money. All of which are bean-counting idiocy parry the first.

>should've just let the tyrants and senators take turns butchering each other forever while they struggle to actually conquer places because the best generals were in a civil war with each other while their second-in-commands got killed during a capmpaign

I'm not gonna act like Marius and Sulla were some kind of bastion of Roman Truth and Happiness, but the period before the taking of Greece but after the unification of Italian land under Rome was the clear height. The times before flagrant rejection of tradition and structure, when Rome had a purpose and duty. That was the height that the Empire could never regain, as they flopped around, indulging in Far Eastern goods and Greek literature, while their grip on provinces outside of the Mediterranean weakened and their emperors pranced around in the capital, oblivious to their decline.

how can someone be this factually wrong?
If anything Roman history shows the Emperors ignoring the capital and moving more and more towards the provinces.

>when the degeneracy went rampart?
The act of creating the empire was literally the act of codifying degeneracy into their society in a worst of all worlds compromise

>All the plutocrats got to keep their massive Latifundia and rigged economy
>All the poor urban Romans got their cradle-to-grave welfare state plus state-sponsored bloodsport for entertainment
>All the actual work was done by slaves and permanently disenfranchised 2nd class citizens
>Democracy, self-rule, and citizenship became a cruel joke, a lie that the autocratic government told its population of jaded wagecucks to keep them complacent
>The whole system was grossly unsustainable and could only maintain itself through continuous infusions of foreign conquest booty to act as an economic stimulus

The average Roman during the Punic Wars was a land-owning farmer who supplied his own equipment for war and fought without a wage because he had a vested interest in seeing Rome succeed, and was home from the warring season in time to harvest his crops.

The Average Roman during the Flavians was an impoverished wagecuck who was reliant upon state supplied bread to feed his family, lived in a blighted slum, and only cared about drinking, gambling, and living vicariously through his favorite gladiator, who was most likely a slave forced to slaughter his own kinsmen in a spectacle of depravity which dwarfed the child sacrificing Carthaginians and the head-hunting Celts.

When they ran out of people worth conquering in the late 2nd century (i.e. other people's money) they had no one left to use that bloated military on but each other, and their society began ripping itself to pieces in the 3rd century. Even when Diocletian dispensed with the pleasantries and ruled as an absolute despot it was still a shitshow

Fuck off, LARPing nordcucks. Christianity was specifically a reaction to the rampant degeneracy of the pagan status quo.

>The average Roman during the Punic Wars was a land-owning farmer
I'm pretty sure that's inaccurate. Wasn't the majority of the population not capable of meeting the requirements for being in the military?

Not until wealthy plutocrats began sending them on years long campaigns for so long that by the time they got back to their farms, they had grown fallow and had been foreclosed on, ironically by the same asshole who marched them to war and profited most handsomely from the conquest.

The reforms that the Gracchi brothers were proposing (redistributing state land to impoverished Romans) was their best shot at reform. Lucius Sulla made sure that would never happen again. Julius Caesar was their last real attempt at reforming the system from within, and people's faith in the Republican government permanently shattered after his assassination.

Source on it? That seems incredibly unlikely to me

>muh degeneracy
i wish /pol/ stopped mirroring tumblr with their usage of buzzwords

Roman Empire existed for more than twice as long with Christianity as the state religion than without

And the time when Christianity was the state religion the Roman Empire was it's shittiest.

In what way?

the Roman empire under the reign of Elagabalus in the 220s and the crisis of the third century was far, far worse than it was under Constantine, Gratian, and anyone up until Honorius.

Go away, Gibbon.

Did you study the Roman Empire?

Will Durant has some good writing about the events leading up to the Empire

>degeneracy went rampart
what does that even mean?

I mean on the amount of propertied citizen soldiers during the middle republic

Only if you put the breaking point about five hundred years before the fall of Rome, after all Cato the elder was complaining about degeneracy during his day, he literally based his political campaign for censor around it.

Anything you want it to mean.

>massive influx of snow nigger refugees (Gallic tribes fleeing Hunnic raids)

>massive influx of snow nigger Germanic raids on villages that tax the rulers(government)

>huge reliance on slaves and degeneration of Merian ideals of Roman independence

>decline of Roman male population over the years due to either population increases of other people around him or a degeneration of culture that allows such a population dip of Romans to occur possibly as simple as coming onto riches and becoming greedy and selfish from it

>Germanic cavalry and Gallic forces get swole as fuck in Roman armies and seasoned as fuck learning all the Roman's secrets

>Roman rulers start losing money due to over inflated cities and their management and ridiculous public spending (welfare grain, gladiator events, horse racing events etc.)

>Legions start feeling the decrease in income and the back of the system finally cracks when the Germanic cavalry and forces break off and suddenly the Legions suffer defeats over a period of years, Legions which cannot actually be replaced like in earlier times due to said Roman population problems

>Romans always have had a problem with cavalry and have always dealt with it by just hiring foreign cavalry or getting lucky with their own, now that they have no money to pay said cavalry and no tactical way to defeat them with a foot army they are basically completely fucked due to an overly high reliance on this foreign cavalry

>government collapses, cities become more independent, Western Empire virtually collapses

>These now freely raiding swole cavalry start draining the riches from these cities as they now all must pay off raiders to leave the city alone

>all wealth drained from the Empire as city after city runs out of money and gets sacked untold numbers killed from sackings

>citizens leave cities en masse due to government collapse and stop of free handouts likely die in the wild from the elements

>dark ages ensue

my theory anyway

...

Literally all of this incorrect

>rampart
ah yes /pol/tard """literacy"""

Greekaboo pinko degenerates started tearing up our beautiful Republic as early as the Punic wars, then the Gracchi commies came along and really got the ball rolling. What happened to men like Cincinnatus, the strong silent type?

This.
>No, it was gay romance side-stories and bondage scenes for no reason at all, just like my HBO and Netflix!

Diocletian was a massive nonce who ruined the Roman administration and created a quasi-feudal system that was destined to splinter. It put the real power in the hands of rural landlords and corrupt bureaucrats.

Literally fucking none of this is right holy shit read a fucking book you absolute fucking retard

This is so massively wrong that I'm not sure which part to correct first so I'll just do it sequentially

>massive influx of snow nigger refugees (Gallic tribes fleeing Hunnic raids)
There were no Gallic tribes by this stage apart from on the very extreme outskirts of Brittany, the Gauls had for the most part been thoroughly Romanised.
>massive influx of snow nigger Germanic raids on villages that tax the rulers(government)
This isn't what Germanic raids were, for the most part. They slipped past the border forts so they could live within the Empire. This was actually considered a good thing since they'd have more people to tax.
>huge reliance on slaves and degeneration of Merian ideals of Roman independence
Wrong on both accounts. There were far fewer slave holders in the empire than there had been in the past, and a Marian warrior spirit was experiencing something of a resurgence in popularity, while in prior centuries it had been stamped out to ensure discipline.
>decline of Roman male population over the years due to either population increases of other people around him or a degeneration of culture that allows such a population dip of Romans to occur possibly as simple as coming onto riches and becoming greedy and selfish from it
The population of the city of Rome declined but that was because it was a shithole and nobody wanted to live there. People moved elsewhere, they didn't just disappear.
>Germanic cavalry and Gallic forces get swole as fuck in Roman armies and seasoned as fuck learning all the Roman's secrets
I have no idea what you even mean by this. What are you trying to say? What secrets? What the actual fuck are you on about?
>ridiculous public spending (welfare grain, gladiator events, horse racing events etc.)
There was no grain dole at this point, it had been discontinued for over a century. Gladiatorial events were very unpopular. Chariot racing was only popular in the East.

This. Quality post.

Never post on this board again.

Oh boy. Just get a room you 36

>Legions start feeling the decrease in income
The salary for soldiers increased, not decreased
>and the back of the system finally cracks when the Germanic cavalry and forces break off
Again, what does this mean? The Germanic peoples fighting for Rome and against Rome were different. Moreover, this belies a common misunderstanding of the foederati system. They weren't mercenaries, they were a fully integrated part of the Roman Army.
and suddenly the Legions suffer defeats over a period of years
This didn't happen with any greater frequency than in earlier centuries, the army (there were no "legions" at this point, just another sign that you're talking total bullshit),
>Legions which cannot actually be replaced like in earlier times due to said Roman population problems
The army was larger than it ever had been
>Romans always have had a problem with cavalry
Not since the reign of Gallienus
>now that they have no money to pay said cavalry and no tactical way to defeat them with a foot army they are basically completely fucked due to an overly high reliance on this foreign cavalry
They didn't rely on foreign cavalry at this point. Total bullshit.
>government collapses, cities become more independent, Western Empire virtually collapses
Just wrong
>>These now freely raiding swole cavalry start draining the riches from these cities as they now all must pay off raiders to leave the city alone
This happened twice and for some reason people extrapolate it and assume it happened all the time.
>citizens leave cities en masse due to government collapse and stop of free handouts
Again, there were no "free handouts" and there hadn't been for decades.

Sources:
Late Roman Army by Pat Southern and Karen Dixon
The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History by Pat Southern
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History by Peter Heather
The Late Roman Army by Gabriele Esposito
Late Roman Infantryman by Gerry Enbleton and Simon MacDowall

All this
being said, I'm quite curious as to why you decided it was a good use of your time to type up a massively long post about a subject you clearly know nothing about

The Gracchus bros were just addressing a blindingly fucking obvious problem that the Optimates and other aristocrats refused to acknowledge.

Then, who would have guessed it, murdering them was a massive disaster.

"To confess the truth, the latifundia have ruined Italy, and soon will ruin the provinces as well. Six owners were in possession of half of the province of Africa at the time when the Emperor Nero had them put to death."

>Pliny's Natural History

>Christianity was specifically a reaction to the rampant degeneracy of the pagan status quo.
>prophet shows up in Judea which almost all Jews
I hate germans and christians, youre probably both

There is literally no evidence to suggest that "degeneracy" had any part to play in the fall of the Roman Empire.

Even if it did, it was so minuscule and irrelevant a factor that it pales in comparison to the untold number of long-term economic, agricultural, demographic, political and military crises the Roman world was facing during and after the third century.

>I hate germans and christians, youre probably both
Italian Catholic, actually and I hate sweaty obese nordcucks (who got their ""religion"" from the bargain bin of a used book store) trampling on my heritage with lies and pseudohistory.

The three largest mystery cults in the empire, Christianity, Mithraism, and the unconquerable Sun, were all monotheisms imported from the orient. The empire was a spiritual winter time for classical western civilization, by the 2nd century CE very few Romans were still worshipping the classical Greco-Roman gods aside from aristocratic hold-outs. Like all spiritual winter times, including the one we currently live in, people abandon their faith when it has been reduced to a consumer good propping a socio-political status quo.

The Pax Romana producing a historically unprecedented mixing and exchanging of ideas which was mostly ideas flowing from the cosmopolitan east into the rural west. That's why the most important early centers for the Christian religion were all in major cities: Rome, Corinth, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Jerusalem, Philippi, Thessaloniki, etc, and once early Christians no longer had to worry about the government rounding them up and feeding them to lions, their religion spread like wildfire, reigniting spirituality in the west and preserving the western tradition through the collapse of late antiquity. When there was no longer an economic need for anyone to be writing anything down, the only ones still doing so were Christian hermits and clergy.

The loss of the authority of the patriarchs in the family structre is the true breaking point.

>Roman Empire
>degeneracy

Fuck off Gibbon. Compared to their orgiastic slave cock sucking forebearers the Christians of the late empire were far less "decadent".

The Roman Empire in the west fell apart for the same reason that the Roman Republic had collapsed. Brutal civil wars.

I can't think of a single one of these that is anything more than half right. You're an idiot and this post should be screencapped for all of posterity to witness.

You are a disgrace to this board.

It was a slow build up, and it shouldn't be called degeneracy and it shouldn't be associated with all romans, just the upper class. It was spoils from the expansion of the empire through less justified wars than previous expansions (when it was still a republic and still was threatened by Carthage or needed to gain direct access to that goldmine of culture called Athens).
It was really a combination of a spoiled, insulated, way too rich elite who were too distracted by Opium and orgies. Many would like to blame Christianity but Rome's elite were far gone, past degeneracy and into Decadent territory.
There was another factor, the Roman army since it's beginning always converted some of those Rome conquered into soldiers. This worked well when they were conquering Italy, because they could all be unified as one single place in the world. It was still decently useful when the soldiers were Greek, because of how much culture they shared. When they started adding northern European snow niggers to the mix, people who didn't share their values, things got bad.
It was a combination of a spoiled distracted elite and non-loyal snow niggers being given Roman arms that led to the decadent downfall of the Roman Empire.

Rome would not exist in it's Republic form with representation from both Patricians and Plebians if it wasn't for early influence from greece.

Rome was always incredibely corrupt and degenerate, but they kept themselves afloat through their strong military. This stopped working at some point, because at the east a strong sassanide empire formed, so securing that border occupied close to the whole roman army. Because of this the barbarians were able to settle in western rome unhindered, and the emperors had to compromise more and more with them, but they eventually still broke free.

Tldr: sassanides killed rome.

there are enough stale memes here to fill an entire subreddit

The last generation of the Roman Republic (Caesar's generation), aka Roman Boomers.

You know that the Eastern Roman Empire existed far longer than the Sassanid dynasty?

what of it? He's talking about the END of the empire and how the Sassanid factor influenced it if i'm not mistaken.

user why do you keep posting this picture with that awful filter

Also the Ostrogoths. Though they were just the last straw.

What you wrote in green sounds like heaven to be honest.

After Tarquinius the Based was deposed by the (((oligarchy))) because of some roastie's false accusations

(OP)
Why in the hell people think Rome was super degenerate? Most of them were prudes and when there were a significant minority of degenerates, they would create laws to oppose degeneracy (such as the laws that Augustus created). Many people were called promiscuous because that's the worst insult a Roman could think. It is like liberals in America calling everyone a nazi. I imagine that then, if in a couple of thousands of years, there will be many people thinking that the majority of Americans are nazis, when this is not the truth. There are more Hare Krishnas in America than them.

He means that rome lasted until 1453

It's hard to take someone seriously when the keep using memes and buzzwords to get their point across.
No, it's an accurate post. It's not quality at all.

Goddammit you are a god among men

He's not wrong and Trajan was the first Emperor to spend extraordinary amounts of time out of the capital. Please be seated.

Ironic when people complain about how it was Christianity that ruined Rome when the Eastern Roman Empire lasted 1000 more years mostly undisturbed.

>child sacrificing Carthaginians
>better than anyone

CARTHAGO DELENDA EST!!!

>and created a quasi-feudal system that was destined to splinter. It put the real power in the hands of rural landlords and corrupt bureaucrats.
Just learned about this. Pretty fascinating.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century

>who was most likely a slave forced to slaughter his own kinsmen in a spectacle of depravity

Only the shitty gladiators killed each other, it was not supposed to be lethal.

No mention of Commodus?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus

>Emperor literally took crippled and lame war veterans that were the streets of Rome and had them as a group tied up into a shape of a giant so he could play Hercules and beat them to death in front of thousand of other Romans
>Historians suspect this might have led to his assassination by the Roman military.

Oh yeah... And this...

>For each appearance in the arena, he charged the city of Rome a million sesterces, straining the Roman economy.

So you know what caused the roman empire to fall?

Autism

>Emerges from the Barracks emperors
>Holds the empire together at its worst
He fucking SUCKED guys
Roman degeneracy is a meme. There were no gods who smote the Romans because their excesses got out of hand. Roman power very definitively expanded well after Sulla and Marius, and things overall were objectively better especially into Nerva Antonine dynasty.
Trajan's emperorship falls within the first 150 years of the empire, and after him the next 350 years of emperors did indeed move to the provinces.

>implying that they were actually sacrificing kids instead of merely cremating their bodies

Just because you study relics doesn't mean you have to be one too.

Fuck off kid. He was just responding to the fuck up of the 3rd century crisis caused by having super OP provincial governors. The guy didn't have a shit load of think tanks and policy reports to help him work out that a century later the system would be endangered by egotistical bishops and landlords.

Diocletian did nothing wrong.

What the fuck

This is a lie

I'm pretty sure the biggest reason for Rome's fall was by in large due to the "everyone's a citizen" mandate.

People were doing anything and everything to become a citizen, which was mainly serving in the army or navy. Once that incentive was taken away there was a severe drop in military numbers and a lack of protection along it's borders

>I'm pleased to hear that enough people recognize that this was a huge cause of Roman collapse.

Of course you are you fucking kike

>I'm pretty sure the biggest reason for Rome's fall was by in large due to the "everyone's a citizen" mandate.

Caracalla's edict, and you're right but for the wrong reasons.

Making everyone in the empire a citizen was just granting rights that they pretty much already had by being "allied" or "peacefully conquered", people used military service to get out of poverty since there were daily meals, a bag of denarii and a plot of land at the end of it.

What it did do though is increase taxes of everyone to the lowest pauper and freedman to the same level as wealthy Patricians. The Roman treasury hemorraged like crazy due to bad emperors and war and it wasn't the Roman elites that footed the bill but the less developed subjects in the west, which is part of why the west lagged behind the east afterwards.

Barbarians in the legions weren't serving to gain citizenship, they were levied men in exchange of being inside the empire's borders in the first place, and well, they weren't a problem until the empire got so poor and shaky they couldn't keep their part of the deal.