Now Asia Minor as a whole was really a place which was so dedicated to the production of wine and olive oil that that its own cities often needed to import grain from Egypt or the Black Sea, at added expense (much of the grain produced in the Empire
was exported to Rome).** Grain was really the mainstay of maritime trade in those days, with 2000 to 3000 grain ships travelling from Sicily, Africa and the Black Sea region to Rome every year. So while owners and shippers profited - in fact, while
only** owners and shippers made money out of it - most people in Asia often had to pay higher prices for their food. Not just them: even the people in the provinces where this grain was produced also often paid high prices for it, and in times of shortage went without. Really, the only one who purchased grain cheaply in those days was Rome (around 150,000-200,000 families in the city
received a daily, free grain supply) - with the money supplied, in part, from the tribute of client states!
You can see a possible reference to it in the woes to Babylon in chapter 18:11-13:
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels, pearls, fine linen, purple cloth, silk, scarlet cloth, all kinds of scented wood, all kinds of articles of ivory, all kinds of articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense,
wine, oil, fine flour, wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls.
And just a little note about the wheat and barley. Many of us have white bread on our tables today, but up to the 19th century in fact only the rich ate white wheat bread made of refined flour on a regular basis. The poor who could only buy little to no wheat usually resorted to cheaper grains like barley or rye - normally considered to be inferior cereals better used as animal feed. In fact, the 3rd century BC poet/comedian
Diphilus declared in praise of white bread that “bread made of wheat, as compared with that made of barley, is more nourishing, more digestible, and in every way superior. In order of merit, the bread made from refined [thoroughly sieved] flour comes first, after that bread from ordinary wheat, and then the unbolted, made of flour that has not been sifted.” This mentality is the reverse of the current situation, where whole wheat and bran breads are found to be more nutritious and thus considered to be more favorable than plain ol’ white bread.
About the one quart (a
choinix) of wheat and three quarts of barley costing a denarius thing: the price of grain here costs at least five times and as much as fifteen times what it might in better conditions. (In Sicily around this time for example, wheat only cost eleven to sixteen times
less than the price portrayed in the vision.) A quart was the average daily consumption, the daily ration of a man. In other words, you’ll have to spend all of your daily wage to buy wheat flour enough to feed yourself - never mind your family - for one day. Barley might feed three people, but then again ancient households tended to be larger than that (no nuclear families back then!) - plus, there’s the stigma of it as mentioned of being a ‘poor man’s grain’ and animal fodder. And most importantly that doesn’t take into account taxes and other expenses on which one might also spend that single denarius on.
The daily wage of an unskilled laborer and common soldier was more or less a single denarius. For most of the 1st century AD a legionary was paid 900 sestertii (= 225 denarii, since 4 sestertii = 1 denarius) per year. Under Domitian the annual salary was raised by a third to 1200 sestertii (= 300 denarii), which would be the equivalent of 3.3 sestertii per day. Half of this was deducted for living costs (food, clothing, armor, etc.), leaving the soldier (if he was lucky enough actually to get paid) with about 1.65 sestertii per day - just enough for a single person, but hardly sufficient for a whole family. Praetorian guards (the elite soldiers stationed at Rome serving as the emperor’s bodyguards) would have been paid more, with
auxiliaries (recruits who were not Roman citizens) perhaps less.
