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The Testimonia of Cleidemus are ancient reports about a natural philosopher, probably of the fifth century BC, known only from these notices and usually kept distinct from the Athenian historian of the same name. No writing of his survives. Aristotle records his view that lightning is not a real fire but an appearance, and Theophrastus reports his theory of perception; further notices from Theophrastus' botanical works concern the nature of plants and the right time for sowing.
Although brief, these testimonies preserve the views of one of the lesser-known early Greek thinkers on nature, collected in Diels and Kranz's Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. They show the range of questions pursued alongside the better-known Presocratics, and how Aristotle and Theophrastus recorded the theories of their predecessors.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: DK 62). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).