The momentum of the fighting between the Achaeans and Trojans is hanging in the balance—until high noon arrives, at which point Zeus decides to get out his golden talanta ‘scales’, I.08.69, as he readies to weigh who will win and who will lose. In just a moment, the balance will be tipped in favor of the Trojans. As we see at I.08.070, Zeus had put two kêre ‘portions’ at either end of the scales. Or, to say it etymologically, there are two ‘slices’ that are being weighed at either end, since the noun kḗr is derived from the verb keirein ‘cut, slice’. You can slice it both ways, life or death. Right from the start, though, the slicing is viewed negatively, and that is why at I.08.070 the two slices that Zeus weighs on the scales are already both viewed as ‘slices of death’. For the moment, though, these slices are not yet really ‘slices of death’, since the action is still only at the tipping point, and the outcome is supposedly still in the balance. But the negative connotations of the word kḗr in Homeric diction, which regularly means ‘fated death’ in the singular, as at I.18.118, have already predetermined the prematurely negative view of the fate that now awaits the Achaeans. Once the tipping actually gets underway, the slices for the Achaeans now sink downward at I.08.073–074, while the slices for the Trojans lift upward at I.08.074. So now the ‘slices of death’ are meant for the Achaeans, not for the Trojans. For the Achaeans, both original slices now mean death, and, in fact, the originally single slice on the Achaean side of the scales can now be viewed as many slices for the many fighters. Many of these fighters will die, and so the original kḗr or ‘fate of death’ for the Achaeans cannot any longer be seen as a singularity. Now the slices can be viewed distributively: different Achaeans will get different slices of death, and that is why the single slice that had been pictured at each end of the scale at I.08.070 can now become the plural kêres ‘slices’ of death for the Achaeans at I.08.073. Then at I.08.075 Zeus thunders from on high on top of Mount Ida, and he sends at I.08.075–076 a flaming thunderbolt toward the Achaeans. At I.08.076, the word for the thunderbolt is selas, meaning literally a ‘flash of light’. We see here the first occurrence of the word selas ‘flash of light’ in the Iliad. In occurrences to come, we will see that this powerful word signals the Will of Zeus.