Some modern scholars believe the consular tribunes were elected to support Rome's expanded military presence in Italy or otherwise to command detachments and armies.
More critical views believe the consular tribunate is an invention of later Roman historians meant to explain the appointment of multiple military commanders in the early republic while also trying to reconcile that with a preconceived notion of a permanent two-man consulship.
[3] Livy offered two explanations: that increased demands for military leadership meant more magistrates were necessary or that it was a political tactic related to the Conflict of the Orders in which patricians prevented plebeians from holding the consulship by substituting this tribunate.
From their initial number of three, the consular tribunes were increased to four for the first time in 426 BC in response to the military situation which saw the Roman state capture and annex Fidenae.
[23] This explanation, however, is also somewhat incompatible with the continued appointing of military dictators, election of consular tribunes at time of peace, and their general lack of success in the field.
[19][24] More recently, some authors have argued that consular tribunes may have merely been aristocrats leading their own clients and retainers as private warbands or raiding parties before the Roman state developed its monopoly on military activity.
[27] Fred Drogula argued that consular tribunes and fictitious proconsulships were imputed into the early republic by historians like Livy and Dionysius (or their sources) to rationalise the number of reported officeholders with their preconceived notion of a permanent two-man consulship.
[28] The end of the consular tribunate in 367 BC with the Sextian-Licinian rogations also is "undoubtedly" rejected as being caused by the Conflict of the Orders, attributed instead as reflecting increased demands for Roman government[29] and institutionalisation of military command over a previous system without a fixed number of annual magistrate-commanders.