I sometimes used to wonder what it would have looked like if Crassus had been the triumphant triumvir. I don't wonder that anymore. In fact, I'm sorry I ever did.
My basic understanding: lots and lots of generals "simultaneously" (over ca. 50 years) realizing that the main difference between a general and an emperor by that point was that the emperor was a general who got to tell the others what to do.
That's actually a fairly good basic description, yeah. Add in some additional pressure from the Sassanids and their nasty habit of killing Roman emperors and you have a solid basic outline.
I'm interested in how that crisis facilitated the decline in the West and how the economy shifted from a more national to a local scale, collapse of rule of law and decline of urbanization. Seems like there are lots of lessons to draw from all that.
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(I tried)
Hard to keep the status quo when 1/3 of your population drops dead.
The only real 'winner' was all of four years old when Julius Caesar was elected consul; everyone else was destroyed.