What's wild is that "being Roman" persisted a lot longer than the tax system and patronage networks that had collapsed. It wasn't until a large portion of the people who thought of themselves as "Roman" were invaded by the Eastern Roman Empire that the Roman identity was broken up, to be replaced by the regional identities that people rallied around to defend themselves.

I feel like if the ERE's leaders had taken a different approach, they could have stitched the Western Empire back together, but they broke it.