The Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero[182] is marked by as much vehemence, as much sincerity of enthusiasm, as if Seneca had been Diderot's personal friend. There is a flame, a passion, about it, an ingenuous air of conviction, which are not common in historical apologies. It is inevitable, as the composition is Diderot's, that it should have many a rambling and declamatory page. His paraphrases of Tacitus are the most curious case in literature of the expansion of a style of sombre poetic concentration into the style of exuberant rhetoric. Both Grimm and a Russian princess of the blood urged him even to translate the whole of Tacitus's works, but it is certain that nobody in the world had ever less of Tacitean quality. Still the history is alive. "_I do not compose_," Diderot said in the dedication. "_I am no author; I read or I converse; I ask questions and I give answers._" The writer throws himself into the historic situation with the vivid freshness of a contemporary, and if the criticism is sophistical, at least the picture is admirably dramatic. Seneca's position as the minister of Nero seemed exactly one of those cases which always excited Diderot's deepest interest--a case, we mean, in which the general rules of morality condemn, but common sense acquits. [182] The first edition (1778) was entitled _Essai sur la Vie de Seneque le philosophe, sur ses ecrits, et sur le regne de Claude et de Neron_. In the second edition (1782) this was changed into _Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron, et sur la vie et les ecrits de Seneque_.