But it was rather the reforming plans that drove the senate to create a dictator.

Aulus Cornelius Cossus having been elected dictator, nominated Titus Quinctius Capitolinus his master of the horse.
12.

The dictator, though he perceived that a greater struggle was reserved for him at home than abroad; still, either because there was need of despatch for the war, or supposing that by a victory and a triumph he should add to the powers of the dictatorship itself, held a levee and proceeds into the Pomptine territory, where he had heard that the Volscians had appointed their army to assemble.

I doubt not but that, in addition to satiety, to persons reading of so many wars waged with the Volscians, this same circumstance will suggest itself, which often served as an occasion of surprise to me when perusing the writers who lived nearer to the times of these occurrences, from what source the Volscians and AEquans, so often vanquished, could have procured supplies of soldiers.

And as this has been unnoticed and passed over in silence by ancient writers; on which matter what can I state, except mere opinion, which every one may from his own conjecture form for himself?
It seems probable, either that they employed, as is now practised in the Roman levies, successive generations of their young men one after the other, during the intervals between the wars; or that the armies were not always recruited out of the same states, though the same nation may have made war; or that there was an innumerable multitude of free-men in those places, which, at the present day, Roman slaves save from being a desert, a scanty seminary of soldiers being scarcely left.