Fall Of Rome DBQ Essay

Imagine a domino. You are lining them side-by-side in a chain. If you get lazy and start speeding up, you will knock one over and, one by one, all of the dominos will eventually fall. This is the same with Rome. Rome “developed a soft belly”, as quoted from the background essay, which means that Rome started becoming lazy. At that point, Rome knocked over one domino in the chain. One domino at a time, the “one of the world's greatest empires”, as said in the background essay, became nothing but ruins. But that wasn't the main reasons of Rome's fall. Then what caused Rome to tumble? Economic corruption, weak army, and foreign invaders played a key role leading to the decline of the Roman Empire. Of these, the foremost reason was its weak army.
I observed from document A that there were 13 assassinations during the 50-year period of 235 CE to 285 CE. This statistic shows that many civilians were hungry for the throne. Therefore, they assassinated the emperors, and that resulted with many emperors in one period of time. Like a wobbling chair unstable because of too many people leaning on it, Rome fell from an overwhelming amount of emperors. Another piece of supporting evidence comes from document B, “Hosts of senators, bureaucrats, and clergymen were entitled to avoid the draft.” This quote from the excerpt suggests that the nobles were corrupt. If there are not a lot of soldiers, then shouldn't everyone be required to join the army? Also, a quote from document E reads,“a wealthy lawbreaker is not punished for his injustice…”. This shows that the bottom line to success in Rome was being wealthy, and just for being wealthy, you are automatically free from all charges. This evidently suggests that the government was