Cleobulina (''Κλεοβουλίνη'', 6th century BC) or Eumetis was an ancient Greek poet. She was known for writing riddles, and three riddles attributed to her survive. According to Athenaeus and

Diogenes Laërtius Diogenes Laërtius ( ; grc-gre, Διογένης Λαέρτιος, ; ) was a biographer of the Ancient Greece, Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving ''Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers'' is a ...

, Cleobulina came from

Lindos Lindos (; grc-gre, Λίνδος) is an archaeological site, a fishing village and a former municipality on the island of Rhodes, in the Dodecanese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Rhodes, of which it ...

on the island of Rhodes. She was the daughter of Cleobulus, one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Plutarch says that as a young girl she was a companion of the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus, though according to Diogenes Laërtius she was his mother. If either association is accurate, she must have been active at the beginning of the 6th century BC. Only three riddles attributed to Cleobulina survive. One was clearly well known in antiquity, quoted twice by Aristotle, as well as by Plutarch, Demetrius of Phalerum, and Athenaeus; one survives in quotation by an anonymous philosopher; and the third survives in Plutarch's '' Moralia''. Two are elegiac couplets and the third is a single dactylic hexameter. In antiquity, a larger corpus of riddles were probably attributed to Cleobulina, as Athenaeus mentions a treatise on them by the otherwise unknown Diotimus of Olympene. Two ancient comedies named for Cleobulina are known, though neither survive. The earlier one was written by Cratinus, a writer of Old Comedy; it may have been produced between 451 and 450 BC, as Eusebius says that Cleobulina was especially renowned in that year. The other was by Alexis.

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Riddles of Cleobulina with original textAlternate translation with commentary of the Three RiddlesProject Continua: Biography of Cleobulina
Project Continua is a web-based multimedia resource dedicated to the creation and preservation of women's intellectual history from the earliest surviving evidence into the 21st Century. {{Authority control Ancient Rhodian poets 6th-century BC Greek women Ancient Greek women poets 6th-century BC Greek people 6th-century BC poets 6th-century BC women writers 6th-century BC writers

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