Empire in Chapters: The Rise and Fall of Rome, One Week at a Time

In just one fifty-year stretch of the third century, Rome had at least twenty-six official emperors. And that’s just counting the ones who were formally recognized by the Senate. Last week, we left off with the dramatic end of Nero, an emperor whose tyranny felt, at the time, like the ultimate crisis. But the era that followed a century and a half later would unleash a period of chaos that makes Nero's reign look like a quiet afternoon. What we’re looking at tonight is not the failure of a single man, but the near-total failure of a system. This is the story of the Crisis of the Third Century. The year is 235 AD.

The emperor, Alexander Severus, is on the German frontier with his legions. He's a decent ruler, trying to govern with the Senate, trying to use diplomacy. But his soldiers see diplomacy as weakness. They want a fighter, a general, one of their own. So they murder him. And in his place, they proclaim a giant of a man, a Thracian peasant named Maximinus Thrax, as the new emperor of Rome. And with that single act, the starting gun is fired on fifty years of anarchy. Maximinus is what we now call a "barracks emperor." He never even set foot in Rome during his reign. His power came from the army, and the army alone.

And the army had to be paid. To do that, Maximinus doubled their wages. The problem was, the treasury was empty. So, how do you pay them? You can’t just print money. But you can do the ancient equivalent. You can debase the coinage. This is where the crisis becomes a spiral. At the beginning of the century, the Roman silver coin, the denarius, was about fifty percent silver. Still not great, but it was something. To pay the legions, emperors started minting coins with less and less precious metal, mixing in more copper and tin. The soldiers get their pay, but the coins are worth less. So prices for everything—grain, oil, land—start to go up.

To cover the rising prices, the government has to mint even MORE coins, with even LESS silver. By the middle of the century, the denarius had less than five percent silver. By the end of the crisis, some coins were basically just bronze with a thin silver wash that would rub off in your hand. It was hyperinflation, ancient-style. People stopped trusting money altogether. The entire complex, interconnected economy of the Roman Empire began to grind to a halt. Farmers wouldn't sell their grain for worthless coins. Trade routes that had been active for centuries withered away. People reverted to barter.

A soldier’s loyalty, a senator’s power, a merchant’s livelihood—it all rested on the perceived value of a small metal disc. And when that value collapsed, so did the trust that held the empire together. Now, where have we seen this pattern before? A state that can no longer afford its military, so it starts paying them with money it essentially invents on the spot. It's not just an economic problem; it's a crisis of legitimacy. You can see the same shape in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Crushed by war reparations, the German government fired up the printing presses. The result was hyperinflation so extreme that people were taking wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.

The German mark, like the Roman denarius, became a joke. And that economic chaos destroyed the savings and the faith of the middle class, creating a vacuum that extremists were all too ready to fill. The analogy holds in the mechanism: currency debasement to cover state obligations leads to economic collapse and political instability. But here’s where it breaks. Weimar Germany was a young, fragile republic born from defeat. The Roman Empire was a three-hundred-year-old institution that saw itself as eternal. Its collapse was so much more profound because it was a collapse of something that was supposed to be unbreakable.

And unlike Weimar, Rome’s crisis wasn’t just internal. While the emperors were busy fighting each other, nobody was watching the borders. With the legions constantly marching on Rome to make their general the next emperor—or to kill the current one—the long frontiers on the Rhine and the Danube were left dangerously exposed. Germanic tribes—the Goths, the Alamanni, the Franks—saw their chance. They began pouring across the borders, not just for raids, but to settle. Entire provinces were ravaged. Cities that hadn't seen an enemy for centuries were suddenly building walls in a panic. In the East, a newly aggressive Persian empire, the Sassanians, captured a Roman emperor, Valerian, in battle.

They took him alive. Sassanian rock carvings show the Persian king on horseback, with the Roman emperor kneeling before him in submission. For the Romans, the psychological shock was immense. The empire wasn't just being attacked. It was being humiliated. This created the deadliest feedback loop imaginable. Barbarian invasions required a strong military response. A strong military meant more power for generals, who would then be tempted to make a run for the throne. That meant more civil war. Civil war pulled troops away from the frontiers, which invited more invasions. Lather, rinse, repeat. At one point, during the reign of Gallienus, there were nineteen different usurpers in various parts of the empire at the same time.

It was a machine that was consuming itself. And then, the machine broke. The empire literally fractured into three pieces. This, for me, is the absolute core of the crisis. It’s not just about chaos anymore. It's about disintegration. In the West, the provinces of Gaul, Britain, and Spain broke away. A general named Postumus declared himself emperor of what we now call the Gallic Empire. He set up his own senate, his own consuls, his own capital. And he did a better job of defending the Rhine frontier than the government in Rome could. He wasn’t trying to conquer Rome; he was just trying to govern and protect his part of the world because the central government had failed.

And in the East, something even more remarkable happened. The city of Palmyra, a vital desert trading hub in modern-day Syria, effectively took over. Under its queen, the legendary Zenobia, the Palmyrene Empire seized control of Egypt—Rome’s breadbasket—and much of Asia Minor. Zenobia was brilliant, ambitious, and for a time, she ruled a third of the Roman world. So for about a decade, you have three separate Roman Empires, each with its own ruler, its own army, and its own borders. The entity we call the Roman Empire had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist. It was a geographic expression, not a political reality.

It was over. Except it wasn't. Just when it seemed like the final collapse was inevitable, the empire’s immune system finally kicked in. A series of tough, no-nonsense emperors from the Balkan provinces, known as the Illyrian Emperors, came to the fore. They were soldiers, born in the army camps of the frontier, and they were utterly ruthless. One of them, Claudius Gothicus, inflicted a devastating defeat on the Goths. But the real star was his successor, a man named Aurelian. Aurelian reigned for only five years, from 270 to 275. In those five years, he defeated the Alamanni, who had invaded Italy itself.

He built a massive new set of walls around the city of Rome—the Aurelian Walls, much of which still stand today—a stark admission that the empire’s borders were no longer secure. And then, he turned his attention to the breakaway empires. First, he marched east and defeated Zenobia, bringing Palmyra and the eastern provinces back into the fold. Then he turned west and reconquered the Gallic Empire. In less than five years, he had put the Roman world back together. The Senate gave him the title Restitutor Orbis. The Restorer of the World. It’s an incredible story. A testament to the empire’s deep reserves of resilience.

But the cycle wasn't broken. How did Aurelian’s reign end? He was assassinated by his own troops. The disease that had started the crisis was still there. The lesson of the Third Century was brutal and clear. The old system, the Principate founded by Augustus, was dead. It was a delicate fiction that relied on consensus, tradition, and a military that mostly stayed in its lane. It could not survive this kind of sustained, systemic shock. A single good emperor, even one as brilliant as Aurelian, wasn't enough. You couldn't just restore the world; you had to remake it. The empire had survived, but it was hollowed out, exhausted, and fundamentally broken.

The solution would require not a restorer, but a revolutionary. Someone who would abandon the old fictions for good and build something new, something harder and more autocratic, on the ruins. Saving the Roman Empire meant killing what was left of the Roman Republic.