Abstract: This chapter serves as an introduction to the volume as well as to key issues, aesthetic and political, pertaining to the role of lyric poetry in the development of visual sensibilities and practices in Greek cultures. It claims that the rich area of lyric production (understood here inclusively as the totality of melic, elegiac and iambic genres) reflected, shaped, and interacted with dominant modalities of viewing in Greek cultures, creating at least three diverse and manifold spectatorships. The second part of the chapter discusses painting as an emblematic instance of lyric poetry's relationship with the visual. An attempt is made to illuminate the famous, but quite obscure, Simonidean statement about the relationship between poetry and painting. Lyric poetry in relation to ekphrastic discourses is discussed throughout the chapter.