Tribal Assembly
However, there is considerable reason to doubt this story, which Livy attributes to urban rabble in the forum, as large masses of urban poor did not really exist in the middle Republic. Furthermore, rural landowners controlled the vast majority of the votes in the Plebeian Council (), as they controlled 29 of the voting blocs that never numbered more than 35, since the Council was organised in the same way as the Tribal Assembly (), just with the exclusion of patricians. The more likely cause is therefore the desire of rural plebeians to control the distribution of public lands () won in the Third Samnite War.