The motif is a consolation payment, and the served page shows the whole transaction. Tiresias saw Athena bathing; "she covered his eyes with her hands, and so rendered him sightless" [The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK III, ch. VI]. His mother Chariclo, the goddess's favourite, begged the sight back; "she could not do so", but "by cleansing his ears she caused him to understand every note of birds" [ibid.]. She added "a staff of cornel-wood", "wherewith he walked like those who see" [ibid.]. The theology is in the exchange rate: an editor's note explains, from Callimachus, that the laws of the gods "inflicted the penalty of blindness on anyone who beheld an immortal" without consent — a statute even Athena cannot repeal, only offset [ibid., editor's note]. So the ears are purged because the eyes cannot be restored: bird-speech here is not a gift but damages, and the seer's famous equipment — augury and the staff that replaces sight — is an out-of-court settlement with heaven. Thompson's apparatus holds a single row for this address, the Greek one; it is the page we have just read.