>>507303601Their reliance on slave labour and willingness to hand out citizenship to anyone willing to fight for their Empire meant it acted not only as a conduit to muttify the city of Rome (which was minority Italian by the end) but also muttify the Middle East and North Africa by sending over Germanics and Celtics. Italy only returned to it's pre-Empire stage of Italianness after the collapse and subsequent invasions by aforementioned Germanic tribes (who were a small, aristocratic elite, the real demography changes were Italian country folk taking back their cities).
The Roman Empire gets endless praise from people but they must be historically illiterate, it was a disaster culturally, ethnically, financially, and ecologically. It's the fault of the Renaissance I think, which exalted the Romans as technologically advanced and less affected by the dourness of Christendom which is again ironic because it was those same foreigners who imported Christianity with them to the Empire.