Calyce belonged to the Aeolid house of Thessaly. Her father was Aeolus, son of Hellen and the nymph Orseis, and her mother was Enarete, daughter of Deimachus. Apollodorus lists seven sons and five daughters in their family. The sons are Cretheus, Sisyphus, Athamas, Salmoneus, Deion, Magnes and Perieres; the daughters are Canace, Alcyone, Pisidice, Calyce and Perimede. Their marriages and descendants spread through the genealogies of Iolcus, Corinth, Boeotia, Elis and other regions. Calyce's father is therefore a figure of ancestry and kingship. He must not be confused with Aeolus, son of Hippotes, the keeper of the winds on the island visited by Odysseus. A shared name does not make the two families one household.

Calyce married Aethlius, a legendary ruler associated with Elis. In Apollodorus, Aethlius is the son of Zeus and Protogenia, daughter of Deucalion; Calyce and Aethlius are the parents of Endymion. The same passage adds that some made Endymion a son of Zeus instead. Pausanias also preserves an alternative in which Aethlius was regarded as a son of Aeolus. Such variations are part of the genealogy's transmission and should not be turned into an account of Calyce marrying the wind-king's son or moving between incompatible generations. The main line followed here makes her Aethlius's wife and Endymion's mother. Through that union, a daughter of the Thessalian Aeolid family enters the ancestry of the Elean kings.

Endymion's story gives Calyce her strongest connection with the wider mythology. Apollodorus describes him leading Aeolians from Thessaly to Elis and establishing himself there. His exceptional beauty attracts Selene, the goddess of the moon, and Zeus allows him to choose a gift. He chooses to sleep for ever while remaining deathless and ageless. The famous image of Selene visiting a sleeping youth belongs to this tradition of divine love and suspended time. Yet the western Greek king and the sleeper on Mount Latmus should not be made into a single, securely mapped biography. Pausanias records that the Eleans showed a tomb of Endymion, while the people near Heracleia in Caria said that he withdrew to Latmus and honoured him there. Calyce's connection to the mountain is through her son's story, not a recorded journey of her own.

The Elean tradition also remembers Endymion as a father and ruler. Pausanias names his sons Paeon, Epeius and Aetolus, along with a daughter, Eurycyda, while reporting different names for their mother. Endymion sets his sons a race at Olympia with the kingdom as the prize, and Epeius wins. Aetolus later belongs to the stories explaining the name and ancestry of Aetolia. These accounts link Calyce's descendants with royal succession and the legendary beginnings of contests at Olympia. They do not establish that her family founded the historical Olympic festival exactly as the stories describe, or that the city of Elis and the sanctuary of Olympia were the same place. The race belongs to a remembered heroic past, alongside the quite different tradition of Endymion's endless sleep.

Little of Calyce's own life survives beyond these family connections. The passages describing her genealogy do not supply a developed account of her old age, death or burial. Her importance rests in the link between the house of Aeolus and the legends of Elis, and in her relationship to Endymion. She is not thereby identical with every other woman or nymph called Calyce. Her name also has a modern astronomical afterlife: Kalyke, a moon of Jupiter discovered in 2000 and named in 2002, takes its name from the mythological mother of Endymion. That naming preserves the variant spelling and the family association without turning Calyce herself into a moon goddess. The mortal mother and the divine beloved remain different figures within the story.