When did the citizens of the Roman Empire realise that it was crumbling?

That’s a good question.

I think the fact that Marcus Aruelius tried to appease the invaders by allowing them to settle inside the state is an indication that he saw that his empire was weakened. He hoped that perhaps they just wanted to live in Rome, so he let them, hoping that would satisfy them. Appeasement of enemies seldom works.

Thanks for your response @GrandmaC. Aurelius was a man of unique insight though, and ruled 300 years before the Western Empire collapsed. Although the years following his death did not bring any great period of stable leadership, the Empire was still a peerless force for many more years. Do you have any thoughts as to when the Senate or the general citizenry realised?

The decline of the Roman Empire began about 400 years before the actual collapse. I think the fall could be seen by some from the very beginning of the decline, but I suppose that’s not your question. You want to know when the people realized the end was imminent.

I personally think it was a very gradual process from the beginning of the decline to the actual fall. It was more like a frog sitting in water that is heated very slowly rather than being suddenly dropped into boiling hot water.

I would think that by the time that the empire was split in two and Alaric sacked Rome in 400, there must have been a number of people wondering if something was amiss.

Here is an interesting discussion of it from a course on Ancient Civilization at Utah State University.

If I remember anything from my old history classes, the Roman Empire didn’t really fall; it split into two sections. The western portion collapsed fairly quickly, but the eastern part, based in Constantinople, thrived for a long time.

I’m writing this off the top of my head – no Wikipedia allowed! – so my memory’s fuzzy.

I do recall that the abundance of slavery may have been the most significant factor of Rome’s decline. For so many centuries, the Romans conquered and enslaved other cultures. There’d been such a steady supply of slaves, constantly replenished, that Rome failed to modernize and develop labor-saving technology.

When the Western Empire fell, perhaps they didn’t really think about it. What is usually called the fall of the Roman Empire is actually pretty arbitrary – the overthrow of the last Roman emperor in the west. The Eastern Empire lasted another millennium. Charlemagne was crowned emperor over 300 years later, so there was certainly some sense that the empire could or should or did continue even then. And in theory, the existence of things like the Holy Roman Empire implies the same. Even Napoleon’s crowning of himself as emperor in the 19th century harkens back to it.

You can definitely say effective Roman administration in the west fizzled in the fifth century and was gone by the 6th century. But whether people knew it or cared is another question. I think Norman Cantor argued it was a loss of identity.

The Eastern Roman Empire, of course, fell much more abruptly in 1453 and their citizens probably couldn’t have missed it….

Depending on what disinformation the government was putting out, I think the average citizen may not have known until the Vandals or Goths or whichever tribe of Barbarians got there were sacking their homes.

Thanks all for your well thought out answers. I am primarily interested in the Western Empire, as it gradually crumbled rather than being defeated militarily like the Eastern Empire so much later.

The western empire was gradually defeated militarily by the Germanic tribes, technically. If you consider him the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus was simply deposed by Odoacer and from then on, in theory, the western emperor’s seat was simply vacant. Claimants for the seat would come and go for millennia.

I guess the question is why nobody cared enough to fill the seat. The eastern emperor probably at first considered himself to be western and eastern emperor by default, and I guess that situation lasted until sometime around Justinian, who re-conquered much of the west and Africa (bringing the Eastern Empire to its greatest post-5th century extent). That was the last time the eastern empire exerted effective control over most of the west.

Here is one possible answer why that stopped: in the mid-6th century, Europe had a massive plague outbreak, which probably killed tens of millions of people. This crippled the Eastern Empire so much that it never really recovered territorially, and made it easier pickings for Muslims in the next century. By the time the empire sort of recovered militarily, several centuries had gone by and the Germanic kingships that established in the former western empire were powerful in their own right. The book Justinian’s Flea is a good read for some extensive background about this period.