Secondly, it is hardly likely that Augustus, after forty years unchallenged in the purple, felt the poetry of Ovid to be a serious threat or even embarrassment to his social policies. Thirdly, Ovid's own statement from his Black Sea exile that his relegation was because of 'carmen et error' ('a song and a mistake') is, for many reasons, hardly admissible. It is more probable that Ovid was somehow caught up in factional politics connected with the succession: Agrippa Postumus, Augustus' adopted son, and Augustus' granddaughter, Vipsania Julilla, were both relegated at around the same time. This would also explain why Ovid was not reprieved when Augustus was succeeded by Agrippa's rival Tiberius. It is likely, then, that the Ars amatoria was used as an excuse for the relegation. This would be neither the first nor the last time a 'crackdown on immorality' disguised an uncomfortable political secret. Legacy The Ars amatoria created considerable interest at the time of its publication. On a lesser scale, Martial's epigrams take a similar context of advising readers on love. Modern literature has been continually influenced by the Ars amatoria, which has presented additional information on the relationship between Ovid's poem and more current writings. Pioneering feminist historian Emily James Putnam wrote that Medieval Europe, deaf to the humor that Ovid intended, took seriously the mock-analytical framework of Ars amatoria as a cue for further academic exegesis:The tendency of the Middle Age toward the neat, the systematic, and the encyclopaedic, which made it so easy a prey to Aristotle, had the oddest results when directed toward the passion of love. Ovid's jeu d'esprit, the Ars Amatoria, was playfully set in a framework of Alexandrian didacticism. It was mildly amusing in his day to assume that rules could be laid down, by the use of which any one could become 'a master of the art of love,' to use the phrase of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. This work was well known to clerks in its Latin form, and when love became a matter of general theoretical interest, it was rendered into French and became the textbook of the subject. Thanks to its method, love became a department of scholasticism, a matter of definition and rule. The Ars amatoria was included in the syllabuses of mediaeval schools from the second half of the 11th century, and its influence on 12th and 13th centuries' European literature was so