Do I paint it natural, Susie, so you think how it looks?’ 1 This is the voice of Emily Dickinson, a defiant and uncanny poet of the modern era, referring to her own verbal skills. Quintessentially lyric, especially if one admits that lyric thrives in the gaps and breaches of conventional generic taxonomies, Dickinson was repeatedly testing the boundaries between the verbal and the visual in her own recalcitrant manner. Neither the first nor the last among modern poets to approach such issues, the inventiveness and unpredictability of Dickinson’s experimentations are yet particularly telling instances of the way in which modern lyric has always reached out for the world of the visual when exploring the flexibility of its own frontiers. Was this the case in ancient lyric poetry as well? We will probably never learn in what context Simonides of Keos, one of the nine lyric poets of the Alexandrian canon, articulated the famous statement attributed to him by Plutarch: ‘Simonides calls painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks’. 2 It is worth tackling at some length this sweeping utterance about the relationship between the verbal and the visual as it seems to touch upon key aspects of the ways lyric poetry engaged with vision and visuality in antiquity. Before doing so, however, I would like to bring up — if briefly — two sets of broader considerations regarding ancient lyric poetry and its visual demeanor.