Passing over a coarse Galba, a profligate Otho, a beastly Vitellius, a mean Vespasian, and a dissolute Titus, Domitian revived the age of Nero. He seduced his brother's daughter, and carried her away from her husband, bathed habitually in company with a band of prostitutes, and set an example of hideous vice while enacting severe laws against debauchery. After another interval, Commodus converted the palace into a house of prostitution. He kept in his pay three hundred girls of great beauty, and as many youths, and revived his dull senses by the sight of pleasures he could no longer share. Like Nero, he violated his sisters; like him, he assumed the dress and functions of a female, and gratified the court with the spectacle of his marriage to one of his freedmen. Finally, Elagabalus, whom the historian could only compare to a wild beast, surpassed even the most audacious infamies of his predecessors. It was his pride to have been able to teach even the most expert courtesans of Rome something more than they knew; his pleasure to wallow among them naked, and to pull down into the sink of bestiality in which he lived the first officers of the empire. When such was the example set by men in high places, there is no need of inquiring farther into the condition of the public morals. A censor like Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial--and he was, no doubt, a better exponent of public and social life than the stern historian--would only laugh, and copy the model before him. It may safely be asserted that there does not exist in any modern language a piece of writing which indicates so hopelessly depraved a state of morals as Martial's epigram on his wife. SECRET DISEASES AT ROME. At what period, and where, venereal diseases first made their appearance, is a matter of doubt. It was long the opinion of the faculty that they were of modern origin, and that Europe had derived them from America, where the sailors of Columbus had first contracted them. This opinion does not appear to rest on any solid basis, and is now generally rejected. The fact is, that the venereal disease prevailed extensively in Europe in the fifteenth century; but the presumption, from an imposing mass of circumstantial evidence, is that it has afflicted humanity from the beginning of history. Still, it is strange that Greek and Latin authors do not mention it. There is a passage in Juvenal in which allusion is made to a disgusting disease, which appears to bear resemblance to venereal disease. Epigrams of Martial hint at something of the same kind. Celsus describes several diseases of the generative organs, but none of these authors ascribe the diseases they mention to venereal intercourse.