Governments have long demonstrated a willingness to tax just about everything unfortunate enough to exist.

Britain once imposed a tax on hats. British India went to the trouble of maintaining an enormous living hedge to protect its tax on salt. The modern IRS has rules explaining the tax consequences of bribes, kidnapping, and other situations most taxpayers somehow manage to omit from their annual planning sessions.

This knack for taxing everything under the sun is by no means a modern invention. Thousands of years ago, ancient Rome found a way to collect revenue from something everyone produces: urine.

It may be pee, but it was no longer free.

During the reign of Emperor Vespasian in the first century AD, the Roman government imposed what became known as the vectigal urinae: the urine tax. It sounds like one of those historical facts specifically engineered to trick middle-school students into briefly being interested in the Roman Empire, but the basic story is genuine.

Urine was a valuable industrial commodity. Roman textile workers needed it. People collected it. Businesses acquired it. And somewhere in the process, Vespasian looked at this flourishing stream of commerce and reached the conclusion governments have been reaching ever since:

There appears to be some untaxed money here.

Yes, Ancient Rome Really Had a Urine Tax

Vespasian ruled the Roman Empire from AD 69 to 79. Among the more memorable fiscal measures associated with his reign was a tax connected with the collection or commercial use of urine.

We know this because two ancient historians specifically tell us about it.

Suetonius, writing in the early second century, says Vespasian devised an urinae vectigal—literally, a levy or tax involving urine. Cassius Dio likewise describes a tax connected with public urinals.

This does not necessarily mean, however, that Roman citizens had to drop a coin into a slot before relieving themselves. There probably was not a toga-clad tax collector standing beside every public convenience asking whether the customer wanted a receipt.

The tax seems instead to have been imposed somewhere in the commercial system through which urine was collected and used. Exactly where is one of the surprisingly murky parts of the story, and we will get to that shortly.

First we need to answer the question that presumably occurred to everyone other than a Roman fuller:

Why would anyone want to buy urine?

Why Was Urine Worth Money in the First Place?

To understand the Roman urine tax, it helps to forget for a moment that we live in an age when cleaning products arrive in brightly colored bottles bearing reassuring words such as “fresh,” “spring,” and “mountain breeze.”

The Romans had different options.

Human urine contains urea. When urine is allowed to sit around—which is not usually regarded as a selling point today—bacteria break down the urea and produce ammonia. The resulting liquid becomes increasingly alkaline.

That makes stale urine surprisingly useful for removing grease and dirt from fabric.

Roman fullers, the people responsible for cleaning and finishing cloth, took advantage of this chemistry long before anyone knew what a nitrogen atom was. They knew that aged urine worked. For most practical purposes, that was sufficient.

Yesterday’s bodily waste was tomorrow’s laundry detergent.

Sustainability was considerably easier when nobody insisted that sustainability smell nice.

Ancient authors confirm the practice. Pliny the Elder discusses stale urine and specifically mentions fullers, while archaeological and literary evidence shows that urine played an established role in Roman textile processing.

It was also used in other industries, including leatherworking and dyeing. The precise methods varied, but the underlying principle remained the same: urine was not merely something to dispose of. It was raw material.

And once something becomes raw material, it becomes valuable.

Once it becomes valuable, someone starts selling it.

And once people start selling it, eventually someone from the government appears with a clipboard.

Meet the Roman Fuller, Whose Job Description Needed Better Benefits

The Romans called a laundry or textile-finishing establishment a fullonica. The workers were fullones, or fullers.

Calling them “laundry workers” is accurate but somewhat inadequate. A modern laundry employee generally does not begin the workday by climbing into a vat containing a cleaning mixture that included stale human urine.

Roman fullers did.

Textiles were placed in tubs containing water and various cleaning agents, including urine. Workers then stepped into the vats and repeatedly trampled the cloth with their bare feet. This helped work the cleaning solution through the fibers and remove grease and dirt.

A 19th-century reference work on Greek and Roman antiquities, drawing on ancient sources, describes fullers stamping clothing underfoot in vats and notes that human and animal urine was among their most common cleaning agents.

We do not have to rely solely on ancient descriptions. Pompeii has thoughtfully provided physical evidence of the process, albeit through the rather drastic archival technique of being buried by Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

The Fullery of Stephanus at Pompeii was originally a house that was converted into a commercial laundry. Its rooms contained tubs and installations for washing, processing, drying, and finishing fabric. Workers spent hours treading fabrics in liquid containing human and animal urine that had been collected in pots placed along the streets.

Let us pause for a moment to consider the irony that we know what the Romans did with their laundry. We know where they did it. We can reconstruct some of the equipment they used. We know that it involved unspeakable amounts of stale urine. We know all of this, but we still have no idea what the 134 Roman dodecahedra that have been found were for.

We sometimes wish historians had other priorities.

Please Deposit Your Contribution Here

A Roman fullery needed a dependable supply of urine, which raises a logistical question rarely covered in business school:

Where does one obtain commercial quantities of the stuff?

One option, apparently, is to assign a writer to research and write an article about the ancient Roman practice of taxing urine. If this writer’s experience is any indication, spending several hours reading about public urinals, fullers, and vats of stale urine is more than sufficient to keep the raw material flowing.

Parents currently potty-training toddlers may wish to take note. Forget turning on the faucet while waiting for Junior to tinkle. Give him a research assignment on Vespasian’s urine tax. If the past several hours are any indication, the results should be considerably more productive.

The Roman solution, however, was remarkably efficient. Large pottery containers could be positioned along streets where passersby contributed to the local textile industry in the most direct way available to them.

Some of these improvised public urinals were large amphorae with their upper portions removed, often described as dolia curta. Literary and archaeological evidence associates street containers with the collection of urine for use by fullers.

The Romans had effectively created a system in which one person’s waste became another person’s raw material. Fullers needed the stuff badly enough that street collection containers supplied it in quantity. The arrangement was efficient, sustainable, and—nearly two millennia before Bob and Doug McKenzie arrived in Strange Brew—gave an entirely different meaning to “Take off, you hoser.”

The system had much to recommend it, provided one had a sufficiently Roman definition of “recommend.”

The person using the container obtained immediate relief. The fuller obtained an essential industrial ingredient. The city had less urine being deposited somewhere even less desirable.

It was recycling, sanitation, and manufacturing all rolled into one.

And then the government discovered the fourth component: tax revenue.

Vespasian Needed Money. Lots of It.

Vespasian did not become emperor during one of Rome’s calmer periods.

AD 69 is known as the Year of the Four Emperors, which is generally not a phrase associated with governmental stability. Nero had died the previous year. Galba became emperor, followed by Otho, followed by Vitellius, followed by Vespasian.

When the parade finally stopped, Vespasian inherited an empire recovering from civil war and a government badly in need of money.

Suetonius reports that Vespasian restored taxes that had been eliminated, created new ones, and increased provincial tribute—in some cases doubling it. He also says Vespasian declared at the beginning of his reign that the state needed 40 billion sesterces to get back on its feet.

Exactly what 40 billion sesterces would be worth today is impossible to calculate, but “a lot” seems reasonably secure. If Suetonius’s figure is taken literally, the sum represented about 44 million years of base pay for an ordinary Roman legionary, whose annual pay in Vespasian’s time was about 900 sesterces.

Economic historian Raymond Goldsmith estimated the entire annual economic output of the Roman Empire at roughly 20 billion sesterces and considered that general level broadly applicable from the late first century BC into the second century AD. On that admittedly rough benchmark, Vespasian was claiming to need something on the order of twice the empire’s annual economic output. In other words, Vespasian did not merely need to check between the imperial sofa cushions.

The larger point is considerably safer: Vespasian needed revenue and developed a reputation for looking for it enthusiastically.

Rome had something useful being collected from the public and transferred to commercial businesses, while Vespasian had a treasury in desperate need of revenue.

The inevitable occurred.

To Vespasian, urine was not merely a disgusting waste product. It was an untapped revenue stream, an expression that in this particular case can unfortunately be taken literally.

So What Exactly Did Vespasian Tax?

This is where the familiar story becomes less certain.

Many modern retellings describe the vectigal urinae with remarkable precision. They tell us exactly who paid it, what was taxed, where the urine came from, and sometimes even make it sound like Vespasian invented the pay toilet.

The ancient sources are not nearly so helpful.

Suetonius merely tells us Vespasian devised a tax involving urine. Cassius Dio describes a tax upon public urinals. Neither provides anything resembling the Roman equivalent of Treasury regulations.

Modern scholars therefore have to reconstruct the system from fragments. An overview in the Oxford Handbook discussion of taxation in the Roman Principate notes that the famous urine tax may have been a levy paid by fullers or tanners when they used urine in their businesses rather than some universal charge imposed on everyone who used a public urinal.

It may have involved those purchasing or collecting urine. It may have been connected with concessions or contracts governing public urinals. The commercial users of the urine may have borne the burden. The surviving evidence does not allow us to recreate every detail with confidence.

What we can safely say is that Vespasian found a way to derive government revenue from an existing economic system in which urine was collected because businesses found it useful.

That is strange enough. There is no need to improve upon it.

Did Nero Tax Urine First?

There is another complication.

A widely repeated version of the story says Emperor Nero first imposed the urine tax, later abolished it, and Vespasian merely restored it around AD 70.

You will find that statement repeated in books, articles, and even scholarly publications. It is possible. The problem is that the surviving ancient evidence for the famous vectigal urinae securely connects the story to Vespasian, while the administrative history behind it is considerably less clear than many popular summaries imply.

That leaves us with one of history’s recurring annoyances: a statement can be repeated so many times that eventually the number of repetitions begins to masquerade as additional evidence.

For our purposes, the safest formulation is that urine-related taxation is firmly associated with Vespasian. Nero may have imposed an earlier version, as many modern accounts maintain, but that part of the story should be presented with more caution than the internet generally allows.

Titus Objects, and “Money Doesn’t Stink” Is Born

Whatever the precise workings of the tax, Vespasian’s son Titus was apparently not impressed. Suetonius says Titus criticized his father for devising the tax, and Vespasian responded in a fashion that probably tells us more about his personality than several pages of imperial biography could accomplish.

When the first proceeds from the tax arrived, Vespasian took some of the money and held it beneath Titus’s nose. Did it smell bad? Titus admitted that it did not. “Yet it comes from urine,” Vespasian replied.

Cassius Dio preserves substantially the same story. In his version, Vespasian showed Titus gold obtained from the tax and asked whether the money itself had any smell. This was imperial fiscal policy explained with the sort of dad joke that somehow survives for two thousand years.

It was also perfectly consistent with Vespasian’s reported sense of humor. Suetonius portrays him as a man who regularly made jokes about his own aggressive pursuit of revenue. When delegates informed him that an expensive colossal statue had been voted in his honor, he supposedly held out his empty hand and announced that the pedestal was ready. Even on his deathbed, when Roman emperors could reasonably be excused for losing their comic timing, Vespasian reportedly observed, “Dear me, I think I’m becoming a god,” a reference to the Roman custom of deifying dead emperors.

The exchange with Titus also gave rise to one of Latin’s most enduring expressions: pecunia non olet—“money does not smell,” or more idiomatically, “money doesn’t stink.” There is just one small problem: neither surviving account records Vespasian saying those exact words.

At least, neither Suetonius nor Cassius Dio puts those words in his mouth. In Suetonius’s Latin, Vespasian’s actual punchline is Atqui e lotio est—essentially, “Yet it comes from urine.” Cassius Dio likewise records the exchange about whether the gold smelled, but not the familiar phrase pecunia non olet.

We fully expect Atqui e lotio est to turn up eventually on one of the delightfully improbable T-shirts designed by our friend Sopantooth. Frankly, it has everything a good T-shirt slogan needs: Latin, bodily fluids, and almost no chance of anyone at the grocery store knowing what it means.

Pecunia non olet appears instead to be the proverbial lesson later distilled from the anecdote rather than a verbatim quotation preserved from Vespasian himself. That does not make it fraudulent; it simply places it in the enormous historical category labeled “Things Famous People Are Supposed to Have Said Because the Shorter Version Fits Better on a Coffee Mug.”

The sentiment belongs to Vespasian. The wording, apparently, belongs to posterity.

Yes, Urine Also Appears in Ancient Dental Care

At this point, we could conclude that urine has contributed quite enough to this article.

The ancient world disagrees.

Another widely repeated claim says Romans used urine to whiten their teeth. As with the urine tax itself, there is some genuine ancient evidence underneath the modern version, but it deserves considerably more careful wording.

About a century before Vespasian, the Roman poet Catullus wrote a wonderfully insulting poem about a Celtiberian named Egnatius who apparently smiled too much.

In Catullus 39, the poet mocks Egnatius’s suspiciously white teeth by claiming that people in Celtiberia rubbed their teeth and gums with urine. The whiter Egnatius’s smile, Catullus suggests, the more urine it advertised.

This is useful evidence that the practice was known in the Roman world.

It is not evidence that every Roman began the morning by filling a cup and reaching for a toothbrush.

In fact, Catullus’s joke works partly because he presents the habit as a peculiar foreign custom. His poem is mockery, not a recommendation from the Roman Dental Association.

As with so much internet history, “urine was sometimes used as a dental cleaner in antiquity” gradually evolved into “Romans brushed their teeth with pee.”

The first statement is defensible.

The second has better click-through potential.

Two Thousand Years Later, Vespasian Still Has His Name on the Bathroom

Vespasian’s association with public urination proved surprisingly durable.

In 19th-century France, public urinals became known as vespasiennes, a name derived from Emperor Vespasian.

This occasionally produces another distorted version of the story: that Vespasian invented public urinals.

He did not.

The French National Centre for Textual and Lexical Resources specifically notes that the name refers not to Vespasian creating public urinals but to his tax on the collection of urine. The French term appeared in the 19th century, when public urinal structures became common on the streets of Paris.

This is a peculiar form of immortality.

Roman emperors commissioned temples, arches, monuments, statues, coins, inscriptions, and enormous public works in hopes of ensuring their names would survive the centuries.

Vespasian did all of that, too. He founded the Flavian dynasty. He began construction of what we now call the Colosseum. He restored political stability after civil war and governed the Roman world for a decade.

And for generations of Frenchmen looking for somewhere to urinate, his name was on the bathroom.

The Urine Tax Was Strange, but It Wasn’t Stupid

It is tempting to classify the Roman urine tax alongside history’s more ridiculous attempts at raising money, but Vespasian’s urine tax makes a certain amount of economic sense.

The Romans had a waste product. That waste product was useful. Businesses wanted it badly enough to collect or purchase it. An organized system developed for moving it from people who wanted to get rid of it to people who could put it to work.

At that point, urine had ceased to be merely waste.

It had become a commodity.

From Vespasian’s perspective, taxing it was no more inherently absurd than taxing any other commercial transaction. The fact that everyone preferred not to think too carefully about the merchandise did nothing to diminish its economic value.

That was precisely the point of his demonstration to Titus.

The smell remained at the street container. It followed the collector. It certainly accompanied the fuller into his vat.

But by the time the transaction reached the imperial treasury, all Vespasian had was money.

And the money didn’t stink.

Rome Found Value in the Most Unlikely Place

The story of Vespasian’s urine tax has survived for nearly two thousand years because it is almost too good to flush away. An emperor found a way to tax pee, his son objected, and Vespasian responded by holding the proceeds under Titus’s nose and pointing out that the money itself smelled just fine.

Behind the joke, however, was a perfectly rational piece of Roman economics. Urine was not merely waste. Fullers and other trades could put it to use, collectors could supply it, and once it entered commerce, Vespasian saw no reason to let that particular revenue stream run untapped.

We may never know exactly how the vectigal urinae was assessed, precisely who had to pay it, or whether Nero had already dipped a toe into these waters before Vespasian came along. The surviving sources simply do not give us enough detail to settle every question. History has left us with a few gaps in the plumbing.

What we do know is that the Romans found value in something most people were only interested in getting rid of, and Vespasian found a way to make the imperial treasury benefit from it. In the process, he became permanently associated with the idea that money does not stink and, centuries later, even lent his name to French public urinals.

Plenty of Roman emperors built monuments in hopes that posterity would remember them. Vespasian managed to leave his mark on history in a rather different way.

You might say his legacy was never completely flushed.

And for an emperor who knew how to turn pee into revenue, that seems entirely appropriate.

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