Pecunia non olet.

Money don’t smell.

According to Suetonius, when to Roman emperor Vespasian imposed a urine tax, his son Titus complained of the money’s disgusting nature. Now you’re probably asking yourself what in heaven’s name is a urine tax. Well, the urine collected from Rome’s public urinals was sold as an ingredient for multiple chemical processes. So no, the people of Rome didn’t pay a tax to urinate. Instead, the buyers of the urine did. You can probably imagine what happened next. Vespasian’s answer to his son was to hold up a gold coin and ask whether it smelled. The rest is… history.