wounded vanity. Seneca was at this very moment attempting to retire from public life. The court of Nero had become no place for him. Lucan cannot have been unaffected by the action of his uncle, and it is only just to him to admit the possibility that the change in his attitude may have been due, at any rate in part, to a change in character, an awakening to the needs of the State and the needs of his own soul. There is no need to question the genuineness of his political enthusiasm, even though it tended to be theatrical and may have been largely kindled by motives not wholly disinterested. The Pisonian conspiracy found in him a ready coadjutor. He became one of the ringleaders of the plot ('paene signifer coniurationis'), and in a bombastic vein would promise Nero's head to his fellow-conspirators.[256] On the detection of the plot, in 65 A. D., he, with the other chiefs of the conspiracy, was arrested. For long he denied his complicity; at last, perhaps on the threat or application of torture, his nerve failed him; he descended to grovelling entreaties, and to win himself a reprieve accused his innocent mother, Acilia, of complicity in the plot.[257] His conduct does not admit of excuse. But it is not for the plain, matter-of-fact man to pass judgement lightly on the weakness of a highly-strung, nervous, artistic temperament; the artist's imagination may transmute pain such as others might hope to bear, to anguish such as they cannot even imagine. There lies the palliation, if palliation it be, of Lucan's crime. But it availed him nothing: the reprieve was never won; he was condemned to die, the manner of his death being left to his free choice. He wrote a few instructions for his father as to the editing of his poems, partook of a sumptuous dinner, and then, adopting the fashionable form of suicide, cut the arteries of his arms and bled to death. He died declaiming a passage from his own poetry in which he had described the death of a soldier from loss of blood.[258] It was a theatrical end, and not out of keeping with his life.