Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire.

[Humility]

I disagree.I highly respect your opinion, however.

A general did not work itself out (in a way it did, the trouble was others decided they would like to be top too... So ultimately this failed...). Keep in mind, the Marian reforms made it possible to have a long standing army, kept around both in peace-time and war.

Which, while having its' benefits, had one other huge draw-back.

In fact it is because of the Marian reforms that some Generals used their armies to continue to stay in power (or Imperium) longer then they should have. Eventually this lead to some of them becoming Emperor in all but name. None of this would have been possible, if not for the shift in loyalty from the state, to the General leading the men (which again can be traced back to the Marian reforms).

A large standing army was a requirement anyway, the frontier required a large force to prevent Barbarian raids. And the civil wars did work themselves out, because for a long duration, I forget how many hundred of years, after the climax of the civil wars the roman empire was whole and without civil war. There was just a general decline as their Barbarian army faced off against other Barbarians.

Without a large standing army, the Roman Empire would have collapsed long before it did as Barbarians plundered and raided them without pursuit or adequate defense.

[Heraclius]

You also will need to look at the Eastern Roman Empire. It too used the same systems that were laid down by Marius of military, and it became one of the, if not the, longest lasting Empires in history. In order to preserve an Empire, a standing army is a requirement. Mobilization takes time, and if you need to mobilize a reserve of farmers every time a group of barbarians push through the undefended border to raid border towns... you'd never get anything done.

The Roman Army was among the best in the world at its height... and in the end the civil wars that were made possible by the Marian Reforms actually improved the Republic (I'm talking about the wars during the late Republic. The wars near the death of the Empire would have happened regardless, arguably, as a result of massive corruption) and turned it into one of the most powerful empires known to history.

In my opinion, the main failure of the Roman Army was two fold. For one, it failed to embrace cavalry as a major combatant, and relied on infantry with small cavalry support (About 300 horsemen were attached to each 6,000 man Legion if I recall correctly) in Rome's main Legions, though the auxilia would have had more.

The second failure of the Roman army was, as Humility mentioned earlier, the use of Barbarian troops paid in loot to justify not replacing the defensive forces on the Empire's border. But by that time Rome's fate was largely sealed.

The reason that the West fell while the East lived on is because the East understood those two failings and fixed them, while the West did not.

[abracax]

Lets face it, the true beginning of the downfall of Rome was the corruption that had been an accepted part of Roman life before their expansion into an empire. The larger their territory expanded and the richer the Empire became, the more corrupt was their politicians and their upper classes. It was a failure on their part to think that corruption was acceptable and a way to live everyday life. If from the beginning of their rise, they would have curtailed corruption, the Roman Empire might have very well flourished for another 1,000 yrs.

[Heraclius]

I agree completely abracax, corruption felled Rome, as it did so many other powerful Empires. The military failures were factors as well, but corruption was the real killer. A combination of civil wars and greed created the situation that led to the hiring and training of barbarian mercenaries in place of the old Legions. That and other factors, such as lead poisoning, sealed Rome's demise.

But from a strategic and geographical standpoint, the Western Empire actually had a far superior position that the East with only one true frontier and only disorganized barbarians across it. The East had enemies on all sides of it, from the barbarians across the Danube, to the Sassanid Persian Empire to the East, Arabs to the south, the feudal kingdoms of Europe to the west, various nomadic tribes such as the Avars... And it still managed to outlive the West, mostly I think because it cut back on corruption and it had a better grand strategy than the Western Empire did.