Challenges to Cartledge's view of the size of the Spartan deployment force, according to which other historians have provided other justifications for sending the small contingent , which are also possible and valid. Cartledge himself offers three alternative explanations before his explanation of symbolism. His first alternative explanation is that Leonidas had simply miscalculated the force needed to hold the neck of the isthmus and miscalculated accordingly when he realized he was outnumbered. Another proposed explanation is based on Themistocles' degree rationalizing Leonidas' mobilization as an attempt to delay the Persian advance to allow the Athenians and their allies to evacuate and abandon Attica. This approach poses a problem for Cartledge because he does not view the decree as another form of Athenian propaganda and forces the reader to believe that the sacrifice of the Spartan army was planned long before Leonidas arrived at Thermopylae. The last of these alternatives mentioned is that Leonidas acted under the worst conditions given the discouragement of the oracles of Delphi, the problems of another possible Helot uprising and the narrow foreign policy of Sparta which did not encourage aid to its allies Greeks. These problems accumulated with the Feast of Carneia and the Olympic Truce which both prohibited military activity on grounds of sacrilege. Cartledge's explanation for the deployment of 300 Spartans is controversial, but his rationalization of Leonidas' decision to retain his post at Thermopylae includes several possible explanations and is therefore highly representative of the work of other historians. For all the criticism that Green and Cartledge level at their sources, there is a unison in the way they interpreted the end of Persian...... middle of paper ......on by historians. When historians neglect these historiographical questions, new interpretations of the same event emerge. This is evidently seen in the case of Themistocles' decree which could redefine Greek strategy during the Persian invasion and in the case of Callias' peace treaty which could redefine how the war formally ended. This investigation into past historical viewpoints has also established that between Cartledge and Green there are points where they provided different viewpoints on the same subject, as seen in the case of the Oath of Plates. Historical truth is often a virtue rather than a reality, and as historians produce their own interpretations of the past from the same sources, competing views emerge and all of these views either represent the current historical consensus, or challenge and redefine the way we look at the past. pass.