So uhm why is the barley so much cheaper? Actually.. the more I look into this, the more it doesn't sound like famine so much as a decline in food quality, where even wheat becomes a luxury good, and oil and wine are just unthinkable for anyone except the elite.
Those are definitely famine prices. A choenix [1] is about 1 quart (4 C), and a denarius was one day's wage for a laborer [2]. At, say $10/hr, a day's wage is $80. A 5 lb bag of flour has 18 C [3], so that would be $360 for a normal bag of flour! Barley is better, at only $120 for a 5 lb bag. When I've baked bread, about 8 C of flour produces 3 loaves, so a loaf of (manually produced) bread would be about $50!
The text is presumably describing a famine produced by drought, which were regular occurrences in the ancient world, rather than by siege. In the latter, the price of all food rises because the supply is dwindling. But a famine in the highly-connected ancient Mediterranean world would not necessarily affect other areas. Egypt supplied a lot of grain to the empire, so a drought in Egypt would affect grain prices empire-wide. But a drought in Egypt would not necessarily affect olive oil production in, say, Italy.
Regarding Revelation, though, each generation thinks the end times is their generation. One (potential) wheat shortage is hardly enough to qualify as meeting the prophecies... Besides, if we're just going to quote Bible passages, "there will be wars and rumors of wars, but the end is yet to come" (Matthew 24:6) [4] Besides, the only one of the 4 major interpretations of Revelation that actually makes sense of the entire text is that most of the end-time prophecies are about the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which is called preterism (and also partial-preterism). While this does not preclude multiple fulfillments of a prophecy, OP presented no evidence for why the prophecy this out-of-context verse applies to the present situation.
That's what "let them eat cake" means, it's a very confusing expression which means the opposite of what it means, which Marie-Antoinette Bourbon (I think that's her name) said and which got her lynched on the spot.
Since then it means they're replacing an argument about scarcity with an argument about economic subordination, ie get into debt to buy cake if you're out of bread so you can buy cake at 1000x the cost, do whatever we say to not die. Become Marie Antoinette Bourbon's slave.
A modern form of that is American medicine, that's cake. They tell Americans they're getting the best medical care in the world, so it's OK it's the most expensive. In fact it's the opposite, it's the most inferior because it's the most expensive, the less you pay the better the results, with Cuba achieving the absolute best results linked directly to the absolute lowest prices. Like religion, the less money you have the more devout you can be, prayer and fasting.
Correction, she wasn't lynched. She was sent to the guillotine on 14th October 1793 for high treason. Her husband, King Louis XVI, the last king of the regime ancient had already been guillotined months earlier in January.
Gregorian. France adopted it in 1582, and the French Revolutionary calendar hasn’t reached the year 1793 yet (and has no month of October, in any case), so it’s not even a possibility for that date.
