The last slave revolt of any great consequence was the famous Spartacus’s during the Roman Republic. There was never a major slave revolt under the Emperors. By the later Empire there was a major shortage of slaves to grow food, because slaves generally came from conquered non Romans. Once Rome ceased to conquer new territory it ceased to get new slaves. Tilling the soil was something that free Romans would not do, because agricultural income assumed that it was essentially unpaid.
:’) The Romans weren’t really like us, although we got a great amount of stuff from them in the areas of generally being organized and such. They never had a postal system; their magnificent system of roads were built to support the movement of troops, and coincidentally facilitated the movement of goods, and eventually the invading barbarian hordes (no complaint from me, like many people, I’m descended from most or all of the people of Europe, including those which don’t exist as ethnic groups any longer); they didn’t have public education of any kind; their currency was just flat out anarchic; and except for some short periods or specific faiths (Judaism was particularly subject to persecution, and of course for a good while, as it grew in popularity, Christianity; there’s a house in Herculaneum, buried by Etna in 79 AD, which has the nail holes in the wall where a cross was removed as the family fled), they were wide open regarding the importation of cults from all over the Empire and beyond.
The big problem, right back into what is now called the Republic, was a political system that was filled with odd ad hoc additions and subtractions, as well as interfamily enmities. Later in the Republic there were various major threats to Rome (the Gallic sacking of the city; Hannibal’s invasion of Italy) which led to strong single war leaders.
There were a whole series of intermittent civil wars which had gone on for generations by the time Julius Caesar entered the scene. The aristocracy continually screwed everyone else and a few dozen families in perhaps a couple of hundred households literally owned most of the Italian peninsula, with small farms owned by all the other small landowners interspersed. Soldiers who served patriotically often came home to find their lands had been foreclosed by the aristocratic a-holes who coincidentally also ran the government.
The addition of a chief executive (dictator, imper ator, etc) was one of those ad hoc additions, and for a century or so it came and went. Augustus (and his friend and ally Agrippa) finally defeated all his rivals and enemies, partly by cutting off their financing (kinda like the US tries to do with al qaeda, then hands it to the PLO). The office of emperor had no firm system of succession, because in Roman law it wasn’t permissible per se to name ones successor. The Senate supposedly had the power to do so.
When Caligula (the Emperor Gaius) was assassinated, Claudius was declared emperor (I don’t necessarily buy into that story about his hiding behind a curtain) by the Praetorian Guard and the Senate caved in and accepted it. Claudius was a hardworking, smart, but still sickly and crazed, emperor (and Censor, an office he revived in his reign), but there were a number of plots to assassinate him, and of course, the surviving version of his death is that he was murdered by his wife (who was also his niece). For her part, she was made coruler with her son Nero, and appeared on their joint coins but with a larger likeness than Nero. Eventually he got sick of her and had her executed. He also executed his first wife (daughter of Claudius), Claudius’ son, and a number of others.
Vespasian, a very capable general who had served in Britain during that conquest, had to go into voluntary exile because he fell asleep during one of Nero’s “artistic” performances. Eventually he was back in action.
Not too much later, Nero wussed out and killed himself when he heard of a revolt and a pretender to the emperorship. There were at least three simultaneously claiming to be emperor in what is called the year of four emperors. Nero died, the next three were either murdered or killed in battle, and Vespasian (probably the best general Rome had at the time) allowed his own name to be proclaimed. He was actually one of the better emperors, was first of the Flavian emperors, and his two sons succeeded him, one after the other, and didn’t do as good a job as their father had.