Silius monologue (Act 8) — Sejanus: His Fall

Ay, take part. Reveal yourselves, Alas! I scent not your confederacies, Your plots, and combinations! I not know Minion Sejanus hates me: and that all, This boast of law, and law, is but a form, A net of Vulcan’s filing, a mere ingine, To take that life by a pretext of justice, Which you pursue in malice! I want brain, Or nostril to persuade me, that your ends, And purposes are made to what they are, Before my answer! O, you equal gods, Whose justice not a world of wolf-turn’d men Shall make me to accuse, howe’er provoked; Have I for this so oft engaged myself? Stood in the heat and fervour of a fight, When Phœbus sooner hath forsook the day Than I the field, against the blue-eyed Gauls, And crisped Germans? when our Roman eagles Have fann’d the fire, with their labouring wings, And no blow dealt, that left not death behind it? When I have charged, alone, into the troops Of curl’d Sicambrians, routed them, and came Not off, with backward ensigns of a slave; But forward marks, wounds on my breast and face, Were meant to thee, O Cæsar, and thy Rome? And have I this return! did I, for this, Perform so noble and so brave defeat On Sacrovir! O Jove, let it become me To boast my deeds, when he whom they concern, Shall thus forget them.