Why did average Roman citizens begin to feel less loyal to the government during the third century AD?

Answer 1

In the course of the 3rd century Rome was beset by crises. These included ubiquitous civil wars, invasions from beyond the Rhine and Danube, the rise of Sassanid Persia, changes in climate, and economic collapse including a rapid depreciation of currency. In the Latin West, fleeing such crises as far as they could, the elite retreated to their country villas (a process which has been interpreted as the first step towards a recognizably medieval social order in Western Europe), and, with the cities denuded of those governing classes they had been constructed to house, they became somewhat less important. In such a scenario authority became increasingly vested in local grandees rather than in the abstractions of Roman state identity. An important aspect of this issue, however, is the fact that the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries was in many ways a loose confederation of cities and states under Roman hegemony. It was only after the aforementioned 'Crisis of the Third Century', during the reigns of such emperors as Aurelian and most notably Diocletian, that the Rome increasingly came to be a bureacratic state as we might recognize it. Thus, the Roman Empire which developed in response to the crisis of the third century was arguably a more overbearing polity, which attempted to intervene in the lives of its subjects (whether in matters of occupation, religion, or identity) in the name of ensuring unity and cohesion. Though this strategy was without a doubt a success, enabling the empire to survive in the West for a further two centuries, and in the East for more than a millenium, it was not necessarily conducive to 'loyalty' from all sectors of the population, as, indeed, might be imagined.