According to Wikipedia, “Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature.” In the year 8 AD, he was banished by Emperor Augustus to the Black Sea region. It was there that he wrote his book the Metamorphoses. This book is just a series of poems that tell about his view of the god’s ethical performance.

Ovid made it very clear in his book the Metamorphoses that he has a view of the gods ethical performance even if he did not believed it. He included the ethical process of the gods and how they inflict negative and positive sanctions according to it.

On of the main themes in the Metamorphoses is pride. The gods were very prideful beings and so were men. When the gods make ethical decisions, their pride is the key factor of when they did this. It was said in the book that if anybody challenged or denied a gods pride, then the outcome would have extremely negative and very bad consequences.

There is a story based on pride in this book. It is in book number six. It is called “Rustics changed to frogs”. The story is when a god named Latona gives birth to twins, both of which are gods. After birth, she becomes very thirst and goes to a pond to get a drink of water. However, men at the pond resisted her and did not let her by. Latona thought that because she was a god, she should do whatever she wants, whenever she wants, in this case, it is to get a drink of water. She is being prideful. The men were also prideful because they thought that they had the power to stop a spiritual being from doing what she wanted, which is get a drink. They thought that this made them powerful. Latona tried many times to get a drink, but was rejected every time. Finally, she prayed and all the men there turned into frogs. They could no longer have a relationship with the gods. they were objects of nature, just like the animals. The problem in this story is pride. The men were turned into frogs because they were prideful. They were prideful because they thought that they had the power to stop a god from doing what she wanted to do. Because of this, they were punished by being turned into frogs.

Ovid also explains that in his book, it is possible for man to become a god. For example, Venus asked Jupiter to let Aeneas become a god. Jupiter answers this request by letting Venus take Aeneas to the river Numicius to cleanse him of all his immortality and to make him become a god. Another situation in which this happens is when Mars asked Jupiter to let Romulus (the founder of Rome in Roman mythology) become a god. Jupiter says yes and Romulus becomes a god. The way for humans to become a god, as Ovid explains in his book, is not for man to ask, but to do what they say and make them happy.