Odyssey 3.258 · Book 3, lines 258–261
No mound, no mourning
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τῶ κέ οἱ οὐδὲ θανόντι χυτὴν ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἔχευαν, ἀλλʼ ἄρα τόν γε κύνες τε καὶ οἰωνοὶ κατέδαψαν κείμενον ἐν πεδίῳ ἑκὰς ἄστεος, οὐδέ κέ τίς μιν κλαῦσεν Ἀχαιιάδων· μάλα γὰρ μέγα μήσατο ἔργον.
Then not even for him, dead, would they have heaped a mound of earth over him; but dogs and birds would have torn him, as he lay in the plain far from the city, nor would any Achaean woman weep him; for a very great deed he had plotted.
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Nestor continues imagining the vengeance that never came: the shameful death Aegisthus would have suffered — no burial, no mourning — had Menelaus reached home in time.
A note on this passage
Nestor finishes the might-have-been in savage detail. Had Menelaus caught him, Aegisthus would have had no burial mound at all; dogs and carrion birds would have stripped him where he fell, out on the plain beyond the town, and not one Achaean woman would have raised the ritual lament. He earned it, the old man says: the deed he plotted was monstrous.
To be left unburied and unwept is, in this world, the worst end imaginable — the denial of the rites that make a death human. Nestor spends four lines not on what happened but on the disgrace Aegisthus escaped, and the imagined punishment measures the crime. The courtesy has iron under it.
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