Pecunia non olet

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Pecunia non olet (Latin for "money does not smell") is a Latin saying.

The Roman Emperor Vespasian reintroduced a urine tax on public toilets within Rome's now famous Cloaca Maxima (great sewer) system. When his son Titus criticized him, he supposedly pointed out that a coin did not smell, even though it came from urine ("See, my son, if they have any smell."). (Dio Cassius, Roman History, Book 65, chapter 14.)

In the Robert Penn Warren novel "All the King's Men", narrator Jack Burden mentions this quotation in chapter 9.

"Vespasian's axiom" is referred to in passing in the Balzac short story "Sarrasine," in connection with the mysterious origins of the wealth of a Parisian family. The proverb receives some attention in Roland Barthes's detailed analysis of the Balzac story in his critical study S/Z (Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang - Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1974] pages 39-40; see lexia number 26). It is possible that F. Scott Fitzgerald alludes to Vespasian's axiom in The Great Gatsby. As Nick crosses the Queensborough Bridge he observes "the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money." (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York, Scribner, 1925, p. 73).

The saying has equivalents in a number of other languages. The French say "L'argent n'a pas d'odeur"; the Dutch say "Geld stinkt niet". In Slovak is "Peniaze nesmrdia" In German the maxim is "Geld stinkt nicht", in Czech "Peníze nesmrdí", in Romanian "Banii nu au miros", in Hungarian "A pénznek nincs szaga", in Finnish and Estonian "Raha ei haise" and in Polish "Pieniądze nie śmierdzą".