The voice made proclamation of a denarius the choinix of the wheat. There are various opinions concerning the choinix. The English version uses the word in its widest sense for measure of capacity, without defining the capacity. In Ezek. xlv. 10, the Septuagint translators are thought to have used the word in this generic sense, Zugos dikaios, kai metron dikaion, kai choinix dikaia esto humin tou metrou; this is translated to suit the idea, "let there be among you a just balance, and a just measure, and a just choinix." But this is not true to the original; it should be, "a just balance, and a just measure, and let there be to you a just choinix of the measure." Here, the word does not stand for measure in general but for a specific part of measure called choinix. The general opinion of the learned is, that there were three choinixes in use among the Greeks and Latins, of the value of three, four, and eight cotyloe, of three gills each, respectively. The Attic choinix was the most common, and consisted of three cotyloe, or nine gills, or one quart and an eighth, and weighing about two pounds.

"A choinix of wheat a denarius; and three choinixes of barley a denarius." A denarius was a silver coin, worth about fifteen cents, or eight pence sterling. It was a coin of the Roman empire; and thereby indicates in its symbolic use, that the seal prophecy had relation to Greco-Latin affairs. In the English version it is "for a penny," or denarius. In the original, denariou is the genitive of estimation or value; which the English version supposes to be the price of the wheat and barley, and therefore inserts the word "for." I have omitted this word, and in my translation reduced it as near to the original as possible. It may have been the symbolic price of the grain before its assessment, which was to be added; or it may have been the tax assessed independently of the market price. In either view of the case, as emblematic of the financial extortion and all its attendant evils by which the body politic was made black, it was an enormous oppression of the people.

Wheat at fifteen cents, or eight pence, the two pounds, would be four dollars and fifty cents, or about twenty shillings sterling a bushel, estimated at sixty pounds weight. I believe it takes about four bushels to make a barrel of flour, weighing one hundred and ninety-six pounds. Hence, the first cost of the flour would be eighteen dollars, say in Egypt, Roman Africa, or Sicily. To this must be added exporting and importing mercantile profits, and freight to Rome; so that by the time it reached the consumers, it would more than double our New York prices after three years of civil war, in which our social horse has become red. But this would not be all the trouble. To this high price must be added the tax on every bushel, collected by "the robbers of the provinces" before the wheat was converted into flour; so that when the whole should be summed up it would make "a sign" indicative of great distress among the people.

But, if a denarius is to be taken as the price of the grain, three times the quantity of barley could be purchased for that coin -- "three choinixes of barley a denarius" -- twenty-seven gills, or three quarts and three gills. Hence, ten denarii, or about one hundred and fifty cents, would purchase a bushel of untaxed barley. This is high for barley; and indicates some calamitous condition of public affairs, causing the necessaries of life to range so high. It would affect all classes, rich and poor, bond and free; none would be exempt. When the tax was paid on the barley, what would be its price then?

But after all, a denarius may not have been the price of the choinixes; but the tax assessed on each respectively -- a denarius on a choinix of wheat; and a denarius on three choinixes of barley. -- This, I am inclined to believe, is the signification of the voice. If so, a bushel of wheat would be assessed at four dollars and fifty cents; and a bushel of barley at one dollar and fifty cents. This superadded to the market-place would make the cost of the necessaries of life enormous; and cause whole tracts of country to be thrown out of cultivation, and so prepare the way for that famine which came upon the people as one of the miseries of their situation during the fourth seal (ver. 8). The Emperor Trajan likened the undue enlargement of the taxation, with exacting procurators to collect it, to the morbid enlargement of the spleen, causing atrophy. And, after the failure of Alexander Severus, who responded to the Senate’s voice, "not to act unjustly by the oil and the wine," in attempting to ameliorate existing fiscal evils, the history of the sequel illustrates fully the truth of Trajan’s comparison. A general internal wasting of the Roman state resulted from it. Speaking of this seal-period, Gibbon remarks, that the form of the state was still the same as under Hadrian, "but the animating health and vigor was fled; the industry of the people was discouraged and exhausted by a long series of oppression;" and again, "that the general famine, which (soon after Philip’s death) befell the empire, was the inevitable consequence of the rapine and oppression, which extirpated the produce (the wheat and barley) of the present, and the hope of future harvests." The agriculture of the provinces was insensibly ruined; and thus preparation was made for famine. "The injustice and avarice of the provincial governors," says Mosheim, "together with the rapacity of the publicans, by whom the taxes of the country were farmed, were the source and occasion of innumerable grievances to the people;" and another writer says, "the rapacity of the imperial procurators were among the causes that finally wrought the downfall of the empire."

An edict by Aurelian shows what extortion had effected previous to his reign. It speaks incidentally of the desolation in Italy; and urges agriculturists to plant vines on certain extensive fertile lands of Etruria, that had been deserted. With reference to a later period, Gibbon states that sixty years after the death of Constantine, and before a barbarian invader had been seen in Italy, an exemption from taxes was granted for 300,000 acres in the fertile province of Campania, that is, for one eighth of the whole province, as being by actual survey ascertained to be desert; and he ascribes it to the long impoverishing effects of fiscal oppressions; the chief era of which is the period of this third seal.

Thus, the rapine and oppression symbolized in the sign-voice "in the midst of the four living ones," involved both the depopulation and desolation of regions in themselves fertile. People do not abandon to the wild beasts of the forest such tracts of country, unless they are oppressed by their rulers, or left without protection against the barbarians without. The sign-voice in its operation reduced the inhabitants of the earth to despair, and banished every patriotic sentiment from their minds. Illustrative of the personal and family distress induced by official robbery and oppression which Constantine sought to remedy, Gibbon says: "The horrid practice of exposing and murdering their newborn infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces, and especially in Italy. It was the effect of distress; and the distress was principally occasioned by the intolerable burden of taxes, and by the vexatious as well as cruel prosecutions of the officers of the revenue against their insolvent debtors. The less opulent or the less industrious ... instead of rejoicing in an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release their children from the impending miseries of a life which they were themselves unable to support. The humanity of Constantine, moved perhaps by some recent and extraordinary instance of despair, engaged him to address an edict to all the cities of Italy, and afterwards of Africa, directing instant relief to those parents who should produce before the magistrates the children whom their own poverty would not allow them to educate."

The voice, then, of this third seal hieroglyphic, was not the voice of famine, but of an intolerable assessment for state purposes of the abundance already in store, and to be hereafter produced. The era succeeding the seal-period in which they were slaying one another under the generalship of the great machaira, was one of abundance of wheat, barley, oil, and wine. This appears from the testimony of Dion who lived in those times. He says that Septimus Severus celebrated the secular games with extraordinary magnificence, and at his decease, left in the public granaries a provision of grain for seven years, at the rate of 75,000 modii, or pecks, or about 10,000 bushels a day. This was a part of the policy of S. Severus by a constant and liberal distribution of grain and provisions, to captivate the affections of the Roman people. But the policy of his son and successor, the fierce Caracalla, was "to secure the affections of the army, and to esteem the rest of his subjects as of little moment." The liberality and indulgence to the troops was tempered by the father with firmness, authority, and prudence; but the careless profusion of Caracalla’s reign, the inaugural period of the sign-voice of the third seal, was, as Gibbon says, "the inevitable ruin both of the army and of the empire. The excessive increase of their pay and donatives, exhausted the state to enrich the military order, whose modesty in peace, and service in war, are best secured by an honorable poverty."

I take it, then, that the sign-voice may be expressed thus: "Let a choinix of wheat be assessed a denarius; and three choinixes of barley rated at the same; but the oil and the wine thou mayest not act so unjustly by." The signification of this, and the causes operating so grinding and blackening a despotism, will appear in the Lamb’s opening of the seal hereafter to be expounded in the following.