The Fall Of The Roman Empire

The Fall of the Roman Empire
By Daniel Tao 8A

Many theories have been tossed around as to the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. Some have been very plausible, while others are downright silly. Some people believe that it was one, some, most or all of these factors that led to the decline of the Roman Empire. In my opinion, most of these little factors would have led to this end of this great empire's mighty reign.

Firstly, the Roman Empire simply got too big. The rulers were greedy and wanted more land, with more resources, and potentially more wealth. However, during Augustus Caesar's reign, many of the Roman generals refused to heed his warning about the empire not being able to support itself if it were to get larger and they continued to conquer more of Europe. However, they soon payed the price because the bigger the Empire got, the longer border they had. The Romans had to use lots of men to guard the borders from the barbarians and the Germanic Tribes. Soon, they had to hire farmers and that meant a shortage of food. They also had to hire mercenaries and slaves, who later on started to revolt against the Romans. And then it was also the time when soldiers wanted more money for their services which also meant a rise in taxes and in food. This made the poor poorer and angrier as they could not afford to live on what they earned. Which meant that they soon started to resort to crime, another one of the Senate's main troubles.

Furthermore, the pressure from multiple places from the Germanic tribes meant that they had to move a lot of troops around. Soon there'd be no-one to guard Rome from an attack and once someone breached the border it would be a walk in the park to capture Rome. As well as that, the Empire got so big that it took many weeks to get a message or to send reinforcements from one side of the Empire to the other. This caused many problems because the people could not be updated on the information about the northern battlefront and this may have caused some confusion over troops remaining and reinforcements. Quite frankly, they may have very well been attacked by the Germanic Tribes and didn't even know that they had breached the border. In addition, they also had little uprisings that didn't help anyone. There was a constant fight for power with about 28 emperors killed in 32 years. The generals wanted their own share of land in the Empire that became independent and there were quarrels among them often leading to small fights or murders. This certainly didn't help when the Romans were stretched to defend their mighty Empire.

Lastly, the Romans also started getting lazy. The main cause of this was the change of religion to Christianity. The Christians believed that if you kept peace and were "good" during your life, you would go to heaven. The Romans became so obsessed with the afterlife, they didn't even bother to fight wars. The old Roman gods only declared you to be a "good" Roman if you fought hard and died in battle. They had turned from the blood-thirsty Romans to lazy slobs. As well as that, they got rather cocky about their empire and also believed that no-one cold beat them and no-one would dare fight them, so they stop preparing their troops for wars.

In conclusion, I believe all these little factors led to the decline of a great empire.