inefficiency of a new collegiate magistracy, arguing that the Romans would not have made it--with regal powers--an integral part of their constitution in the immediate aftermath of the monarchy's abolition, confining it therefore to a peripheral and extraordinary role. Other scholars have advanced theories that the consuls came after the dictatorship rather than before.

The Latin view argues that the dictatorship emerged from the need to rotate command between Latin states in the role of commanding the Latin League's