when all was lost at Troy, King Priam sent his youngest son, Polydorus, to the neighbor kingdom of Thrace (south Bulgaria, northeast Greece, and northwest Turkey in modern times), "bearing a great weight of gold" (Aeneid, Book 3).

The king of Thrace, Polymestor, once Troy had been destroyed, in his lust for the Trojan prince's gold, joins the Greeks and murders Polydorus.

Later on, when Aeneas departs Troy and sails in search of new country, he stops on the curving shore of Thrace. There he wants to make offerings to the gods. He finds a brush from which to extract green shoots to use in the altar, but something shuddering strikes him.

"Soon as I tear the first stalk
from its roots and rip it up from the earth...
dark blood oozes out and fouls the soil with filth."

It was Polydorus, who talks to Aeneas:

"Spare the body
buried here – spare your own pure hands, don't stain them!
I am no stranger to you. I was born in Troy,
and the blood you see is oozing from no tree...
...
Here they impaled me, an iron planting of lances
covered my body -- now they sprout in stabbing spears!"

As I read the verses, something else visited my mind. An epic song of our days, or perhaps visions of the apocalypse. The second stanza of A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.

"I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' "