But things only get worse after the death of Marcus Aurelius, who's viewed as the last of the five good emperors, so to speak. His son, Commodus, takes over, and Commodus is the beginning of a succession of emperors who are less and less competent, who are, the empire becomes more and more corrupt, less and less stable, and things really come to a head and start to decelerate even further, or I guess accelerate downward even further, in 235 CE, when the emperor Severus Alexander is assassinated. And this throws the empire into a 50-year crisis called the Third Century Crisis, because it happened in the third century. And over this 50 years, there's 26 claimants to emperor. The empire is temporarily split into three different states. There's attacks from the east, from the Sassanids, the Sassanian Empire, they're the successors to the Parthians. You have attacks across the Rhine and the Danube from Germanic tribes.