Haul'd from beneath the violated shade,
And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid.
His right hand held his bloody falchion bare,
His left he twisted in his hoary hair;
Then, with a speeding thrust, his heart he found:
The lukewarm blood came rushing thro' the wound,
And sanguine streams distain'd the sacred ground.
Thus Priam fell, and shar'd one common fate
With Troy in ashes, and his ruin'd state.
He, who the scepter of all Asia sway'd,
Whom monarchs like domestic slaves obey'd.
On the bleak shore now lies th' abandon'd king,
A headless carcass, and a nameless thing.
Works Cited
Berardo, Janet A. Familial Transcendence as Exemplified by Pietas in the Aeneid. Diss. Walden University, 2002. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003. ProQuest. Web. 9 Sept. 2014.
Frost, William. "Dryden's Vergil.” Comparative Literature 36.3 (1984): 193-208. JSTOR. Web. 13 Nov. 2014.
The text alludes to the death of  Pompey , one of the foremost military leaders and political players of the late Republic. During the civil war, he was murdered in Egypt by those who had posed as his allies. His head was famously presented to Julius Caesar, while his decapitated corpse was left on the Egyptian shore. These events are described  here  by Plutarch. 
 As Tristan J. Power observes, the deaths of both men heralded the end of separate periods in the life-history of the Roman people ( 796 ). Whereas Priam’s death marked the fall of Troy and the expulsion of the proto-Romans from their ancestral homeland, Pompey’s death embodied the fall of the Republic and the violence that came with the emerging Empire. 
 A modern dramatization of Pompey’s death, from the HBO series  Rome : 

Vergils Aeneid Book II: The Death of Priam