Quote Originally Posted by Rockie Cantais View Post
Nay! Rome always had power struggles, civil wars, rebellions and invasion and yet they conquered their know world. Only with the break up of family values did they start to fall.
I'll comment on the rest later, but what you're writing here is completely wrong. What turned it all was when Marius and Sulla made soldiers loyal to themselves instead of Rome and that was from there on out the main way to wage war, thus creating a lot of generals with armies who wanted to rule.

There are a lot of factors that led to the downfall of Rome, corruption, greed, largescale barbarian invasions, civil wars, the loss of the free peasant class in favour of big land lords with slaves, letting "barbarians" become the army of Rome, going from a conquering nation to a defending nation, armies loyal to generals rather than Rome, inflation, poverty, the disruption of cities because the rich moved to the countryside to get away from taxation, less trade(this was probably more of a result of some of the above). The break up of family values is not something any historians mention and the Romans still had the family unit at the end, as they had in the beginning.
As you see, there is no single reason why Rome fell.

But if you have something which you think I should read, feel free to show me. :) I am always eager to read more history, especially about Rome.