appears "suspiciously like these [traditional] explanations are simply inferences made from the most obvious differences between the two magistracies [the consular tribunate and the consulship]". Military need Scholars also have rejected the emergence of the consular tribunate from the Conflict of the Orders: "Long ago [i.e., 1924], Meyer rejected Livy's assertion that the consular tribunate was a product of the Conflict of the Orders and instead suggested that increasing competition among patrician families drove up the annual number of commanders". The explanation that the consular tribunate was created to provide plebeians with access to the highest magistracy by a different name also is unconvincing insofar as those plebeians elected are few and late in this tribunate's history. In fact, after the institution of the consular tribunate, no plebeians appear in the fasti for 43 years from 444 to 401 BC. Some modern scholars hold that the selection of consular tribunes reflected Rome's expanded military and administrative needs: that the consular tribunes, elected from the three ancient tribes of the Titienses, Ramnenses, and Luceres, were part of an overall redesign of the military structure of the Roman state to maximise military efficiency, which included the creation of the censorship (responsible for taking the census to identify the numbers of men capable of military duty) and the quaestorship (responsible for the supply of money and goods for the armies). Their appointment coincides with Roman expansion into central Italy; election of larger boards of consular tribunes may have been driven by military necessity. 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. Private aristocrats 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. R. Ross Holloway suggests that individual warlords, whose names and deeds (whether real or fictitious) would have been preserved in family traditions and records, were later anachronistically labeled "tribunes" (or consuls) by compilers who lived in a time when public office and military command went hand in hand. 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