Aeetes

Aeetes is the king of Colchis, son of the sun god Helios and father of Medea: the keeper of the Golden Fleece, who sets Jason deadly trials. Brother of the enchantress Circe and of Pasiphae, queen of Crete, he is the great adversary of the Argonauts.

Hesiod makes him the son of Helios and the Oceanid Perseis and the husband of Idyia, another daughter of Oceanus and the mother of Medea; his other children are Chalciope and Apsyrtus. The Corinthian poet Eumelus, quoted by Pausanias, says that Helios first gave him Ephyra, the later Corinth, but that Aeetes left it to reign at Aia, in Colchis. There he welcomes Phrixus, who has fled Greece on the golden ram: Phrixus sacrifices the ram and gives its fleece to Aeetes, who nails it to an oak in the grove of Ares and gives him his daughter Chalciope as a wife.

When Jason arrives with the Argonauts to claim the Fleece, Aeetes, unwilling to give it up, sets him a task meant to kill him: yoke two fire-breathing bulls with bronze hooves, made by Hephaestus, plow the field of Ares, sow it with dragon's teeth and fight the armed men who spring from the furrows. Medea, struck by love for the hero, gives Jason an ointment that makes him invulnerable for a day and tells him to throw a stone among the earthborn warriors so that they kill each other; then she lulls the sleepless Colchian Dragon and Jason takes the Fleece. So Apollonius of Rhodes tells it in the Argonautica; Pindar's fourth Pythian ode already describes the plowing.

The pursuit of the Argo is told in two ways. In Apollodorus, Medea kills her young brother Apsyrtus and scatters his limbs in the sea so that Aeetes stops to gather them; in Apollonius, Apsyrtus is a grown man leading the Colchian fleet, and Jason kills him in an ambush. Aeetes never recovers the Fleece, and Apollodorus adds that his own brother Perses later dethroned him, until Medea returned to Colchis, killed the usurper and gave the kingdom back to her father.