Title: What were the weaknesses of the Roman Empire? - Quora
Headings: What were the weaknesses of the Roman Empire?
What were the weaknesses of the Roman Empire?
Yassine Sarti
Ionut Sabau
Bryden Walsh

Content: By the first century BC, the Roman army had become almost entirely professional -- where the armies that fought Hannibal had been mostly middle class draftees, the armies of Marius and Sulla consisted of long-service soldiers, usually recruited from the lower classes, who lived and fought far from home for years at a time. These professional troops were cut off from the political and social loyalties of civilians -- and their retirement prospects depended very heavily on the political f
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The big one, the crippling one, was the inability of imperial Rome to keep its military out of politics. By the first century BC, the Roman army had become almost entirely professional -- where the armies that fought Hannibal had been mostly middle class draftees, the armies of Marius and Sulla consisted of long-service soldiers, usually recruited from the lower classes, who lived and fought far from home for years at a time. These professional troops were cut off from the political and social loyalties of civilians -- and their retirement prospects depended very heavily on the political fortunes of the generals who led them. Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar all defined their political careers by lobbying for land grants and other benefits for their veterans. This ended up breaking the tie between the armies and the state, replacing in with a much narrower bond between the armies and their leaders -- particularly when those leaders were charismatic and successful commanders whose conquests provided loot and the promise of comfortable retirement. Between 88 BC and 27 AD, Sulla, Marius, Julius Caesar, Sertorius, Sextus Pompey, Marc Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian Caesar all used their armies against the legal government of Rome -- and while Pompey, Brutus, Cassius and Cato were at least theoretically fighting for the government the all treated their armies more or less as private possessions too. Augustus finally eliminated the last of his rivals in 27 -- the date traditionally used for the final transition from the Republic to the Empire. Although he and his successors tried to preserve the illusion of continuity with the old Republic, he was careful to retain personal control over the military and the finances that made it run. He deliberately fostered the idea that the emperor and the army had a special bond - the ideal of civilian control of the military (once so sacred in the Republic that even a triumphing army could not bring its arms into the city) -- was dead. "