Tribuni militum consulari potestate

Under Roman tradition, consular tribunes were elected in place of consuls as chief magistrates in fifty-one elections between 444 and 367 BC (seventy per cent of the time) and even more commonly between 408 and 367 BC.[1] 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.[2]

Livy states then that the choice whether a collegium of consular tribunes or consuls were to be elected for a given year was made by a decree of the senate.[3] The number of consular tribunes varied between three and six, and because they were considered colleagues of the two censors, there is sometimes mention of the "eight tribunes".[4]

Originally patrician office holders, they were referred to as "military tribunes", and were responsible for leading the armies into battle. It was only much later that they were given the anachronistic addition of "with consular power", in an attempt to distinguish them from the Military tribunes who were the legionary officers of the middle and late Republic.[5]

The tribunes, like their consular predecessors, exercised consular potestas,[6] indicating they must have been elected by the comitia centuriata, and that the current needs of the state could not be served by the previous consular system.[7] 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.[7]

Then in 405 BC, the number of consular tribunes was increased to six for the first time; and after that, apart from the very occasional year in which eight or ten consular tribunes are recorded. The increase was due to the need for the consular tribunes to not only handle the military affairs of Rome, but also the administrative needs of the city as well.[8] The Roman state was led by six consular tribunes for almost every year down to the dissolution of the office and the reintroduction of the consulship and the creation of the praetorship with the Sextian-Licinian Rogations.[9]

The traditional account of the early republic has come under substantial attack that "it was a literary creation of the late republic" with little value for reconstructing the actual history of the early republic.[10]

Scholars also have rejected the emergence of the consular tribunate from the Conflict of the Orders: "Long ago [ie 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".[11]

Some modern scholars 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).[7]

The early history of Roman military command, however, is anomalistic and may reflect annalist "massaging their evidence to make it fit their preconceptions about the structure of Rome's early government".[12] Drogula argues 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.[13] Instead, consular tribunes may merely have been a collection of aristocrats leading warbands or raiding parties before the Roman state imposed a monopoly on military command and activity.[1]

The end of the consular tribunate in 367 BC with the Sextian-Licinian rogations also is decisively rejected as being caused by the Conflict of the Orders, attributed instead as reflecting demands for Roman government.[14] And reflecting institutionalisation of military command over a previous system without a fixed number of annual magistrate-commanders.[15]

Presented by Varronian chronology. For more information on deciphering early Roman names, see Roman names.

• Constitution of the Roman Republic

Books

• Brennan, T. Corey (2001-06-21). The Praetorship in the Roman Republic. 1. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-977135-6.
• Bringmann, Klaus (2007-03-26) [2002]. A History of the Roman Republic. Translated by Smyth, WJ. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-7456-3371-8.
• Forsythe, Gary (2005). A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24991-2.
• Drogula, Fred K. (2015-04-13). Commanders and Command in the Roman Republic and Early Empire. UNC Press Books. ISBN 978-1-4696-2127-2.

• Tribunus