Son of Cretheus and Tyro and elder of the Aeolid line at Iolcus, Aeson is remembered less for ruling than for being passed over: father of Jason, kept from his inheritance by his half-brother Pelias, he is the still point around which the quest for the Fleece turns.1
Both poets set Aeson at the head of the Iolcian house. In Homer, queenly Tyro, having borne Pelias and Neleus to Poseidon, bore to her husband Cretheus three sons who fought from chariots — Aeson, Pheres, and Amythaon. Apollodorus grounds the same pedigree in the city itself: Cretheus founded Iolcus and married Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus, and of her had Aeson, Amythaon, and Pheres. Aeson is thus the legitimate Aeolid heir of the throne his father built.2
His one decisive act is fatherhood, and the sources cannot agree on the woman who shared it. Apollodorus names her Polymede, daughter of the master-thief Autolycus, who bore Aeson a son, Jason; in this telling the Argonaut springs from a line of cunning on his mother's side.3⚖
Apollonius gives the mother another name and another house: Aeson had wedded Alcimede, daughter of Phylacus, herself born of Clymene the daughter of Minyas — a Minyan descent that lets Jason be reckoned among the Minyae who manned the Argo. Her lament as he sails is one of the poem's farewells.4⚖
Cretheus' throne does not pass to Aeson but to Pelias, who reigns in Iolcus after him and so dispossesses the elder line. In Apollodorus the dispossession turns lethal: despairing of the Argonauts' return, Pelias moved to kill Aeson, who asked instead to end his own life and, offering sacrifice, drank his fill of bull's blood and died. His wife cursed Pelias and hanged herself, leaving an infant son, Promachus, whom the king also slew.5
Ovid grants the kinder variant. By Medea's dark craft the aged Aeson is laid in a deathlike sleep, his worn blood drained and his veins filled anew with a brewed elixir, so that the old man is given back his vanished youth.6
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