Why did the roman republic start to become weak?

Answer 1

There are adherents to single factors, but more people think a combination of such factors as Christianity, decadence, lead, monetary trouble, and military problems caused the Fall of Rome. Imperial incompetence and chance could be added to the list. Even the rise of Islam is proposed as the reason for Rome's fall, by some who think the Fall of Rome happened at Constantinople in A.D. 1453.

Answer 2

Well I think one factor we have to look at to the Empire's fall was the fact that it's Army, compared to most modern armies was small . The military forces of the Roman Empire from the accession of Emperor Diocletian in 284 until the Empire's definitive division into Eastern and Western halves in 395 was basically 400,000 strong . Which compared to the size of continental Europe, it wasn't enough . Germany had 20 million 700,000 soldiers in the Wehrmacht by the beginning of the war and still it wasn't enough . I'm not saying they couldn't conqueror most of Europe which they basically did . But the task of holding all that territory alongside invading the Soviet Union as well . To me Europe has always been seen as an enigma in the sense that for thousands of years countless empires have fought for the dominance of Europe and all of them have failed . From the Roman Empire to Napoleon's Empire to Nazi Germany and all have failed . So I think one of the reasons we have to look at is the sheer size of Europe and that it's nothing like the United States in America where for the most part they went unchallenged . But some of the other reasons was the internal corruption within in the Roman Senate, the constant raiding by barbarian hordes from the north: Germanic tribes and the final collapse of the Empire in the West by Flavius Odoacer who deposed the last Roman Emperor Romulus Augustulus . But this was just the Western Roman Empire . The Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire as it was also called lasted long after the West fell . It lasted until 1453 when the Turks invaded Constantinople or Istanbul today which effectively ended the Roman Empire as a whole . So since the birth of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C. to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, Roman dominance in Europe and the Middle East lasted 944 years .

Answer 3

Even under the best of conditions an empire the size of the Roman Empire could probably not have sustained itself. A few reasons:

• Central government in Rome was traditionally weak and understaffed. Means of communication were primitive and it might take weeks or months for any message to get anywhere - if the messenger survived the trip. It was the reason that the Roman Empire already had become divide in two, almost seperately operating Empires, the Western and the Eastern Empire. The Eastern Empire was to survive the West by a thousand years. The Western Empire mostly was the one bedeviled by the following problems:
• Central Government would have needed at least competent Emperors who could develop long-term policies and who had the power to get things done. But most Emperors ruled on average for no more than a few years before they were murdered, usually by their own supporters. Most of them had to spend all their energy on just surviving and only a very few ever got around to actually 'ruling' the Empire
• Because of its size, the Empire always had been divided into Provinces, ruled by Governors. As central Government weakened, the Provinces and their rulers - ever more often chosen from the local elites - became more independent, until in the later years of the Empire, many of them had already become semi-independent States
• the extremely long borders of the Empire had to be guarded by tens of thousands of troops who all had to be paid. Two things happened here: whenever an Emperor had been killed again, army commanders had themselves proclaimed king and often took their troops with them to Rome, leaving the borders guarded by only local auxiliary troops while they themselves added to the general turmoil. The local troops were badly paid, if paid at all, which did not do much for their fighting zeal against foreign intruders
• Finally, the Empire because of its size attracted great number of tribes from outside the Empire, who had often themselves been displaced and were now forced to find a new place to live. Many successfully crossed the weakly-guarded borders and settled in the provinces, further eroding central Roman authority and revenue. The Eastern Empire managed to largely deal with this problem, but the Western Empire in the end did not.

Answer 4

What weakened the Roman Empire were weak emperors, invasions by outsiders, diseases, and a number of other factors.

Answer 5

Because there was no global economy at the time of the Roman Republic.