[1] The assumption that the 'licentiousness' of the Ars amatoria was responsible in part for Ovid's relegation (banishment) by Augustus in 8 AD is dubious, and seems rather to reflect modern sensibilities than historical fact.

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.

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.

[8] It is possible that Edmond Rostand's fictionalized portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac makes an allusion to the Ars amatoria: the theme of the erotic and seductive power of poetry is highly suggestive of Ovid's poem, and Bergerac's nose, a distinguishing feature invented by Rostand, calls to mind Ovid's cognomen, Naso (from nasus, 'large-nosed').