Abstract
English literature coincided with the development of that great popular art form, the drama. He concluded: Here, the great influence of Seneca on poetic lan guage is unquestionable.2 For Eliot, the famous Elizabethan translations of Seneca into a subtler blank verse to reproduce the solemnity and weight of the Senecan iambic represented the transformation of the old form of versification into the new, and therefore the transformation of language and sensibility as well. He stated: Few things that can happen to a nation are more important than the invention of a new form of verse.3 A similar claim may be made for Martial's even longer-lasting influence on English poetry. More than Edmund Waller (1606-87) or Sir John Denham (1615-69), Martial, through his English admirers and imitators, affected the development of English verse until it culminated in the wit and polish of the heroic couplets of Dryden, Pope, and Augustan verse in general.4
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