i've always been amazed at how the romans managed to lose their empire.
They lost it the same way we're losing ours, through unfettered immigration.
When I was first deployed to Italy in 1996 I looked around and asked myself how these people could have ruled the known world at one time. The laziness of the modern day Italian makes the Spanish look industrious. Nice people mind you, but they sure know how to pass a day without accomplishing anything of value. The answer is that modern Italians aren't really descendents of the Romans, or at least they don't have much Roman blood in them. Rome had been so populated by traders and slaves from around the mediterranean that there wasn't much "roman" left in the Romans, they had been bred out of existence. By the time the Roman empire officially fell in 476 it wasn't so much that it fell to invaders but rather that the emperor was deposed by a member of the roman army who was of germanic tribal descent. The emperor at that time was himself germanic, the Roman emperor hadn't been a real roman in a long time.
Multiculturalism is what did the Romans in.
