[1] According to Athenaeus and Diogenes Laërtius, Cleobulina came from Lindos on the island of Rhodes.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
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.