[Stranger43]

The historians cannot even agree on a date for the fall of Rome, let alone a cause. Especially once we remember that Italy were one of the poorer regions of the empire by the time we start seeing any major change to it's structure.

Maybe we should be a bit cautions about what lessons we draw from a an even we cannot even data correctly. As there is a lot more to the story that most introduction textbooks have time to cover, or that the empire as such collapsed as the capital of Constantinople was not sacked until the 4th crusade in the 12th century, and not by barbarians but Christian knights.

When it comes to history we have a tendency to invent the lesson we want to learn and then go look for a way to spin history to fit an existing narrative rather then work the other way around, and let history teach us a lesson.

It was not so much that the barbarians beat the Roman army as it was that the Roman army had been outsourced to a bunch of former barbarian tribes while everyone rich fled east that led to Rome being looted and taxed by the barbarians(but not exactly sacked) And that was centuries after Rome gave up all pretence of being an republic with many deities. The fact that the barbarians weren’t exactly pagan but Christians of a slightly different denomination is also left of of most textbooks.