Indeed if your skilled valuers set a high value on particular rural and urban sites for the reason that this class of property is least liable to damage, how great a value should be set on virtue, of which one can never be robbed or cheated, and which is not lost by shipwreck or fire, or affected by the violence 52of storms or by stormy periods in politics! Those endowed with virtue alone are rich, for they alone possess property that both produces profit and lasts for ever, and they alone have the special characteristic of wealth-contentment with what is theirs they think what they have got is enough and seek for nothing more, they want nothing, think that they lack nothing, need nothing. Not to be covetous is money, not to love buying things is an income in fact contentment with one’s own possessions is a very large and perfectly secure fortune! I only wish we were! but it is one’s mode of life and one’s culture, not one’s valuation for rating, that 51really fixes the amount of one’s money. #PECUNIA EST VIRTUS PLUS#Improbi autem et avari, quoniam incertas atque in casu positas possessiones habent et plus semper appetunt nec eorum quisquam adhuc inventus est cui quod haberet esset satis, non modo non copiosi ac divites sed etiam inopes ac pauperes existimandi sunt. Non esse cupidum pecunia est, non esse emacem vectigal est contentum vero suis rebus esse maximae sunt certissimaeque divitiae.Įtenim si isti callidi rerum aestimatores prata et areas quasdam magno aestimant quod ei generi possessionum minime quasi noceri potest, quanti est aestimanda virtus quae nec eripi nec subripi potest umquam, neque naufragio neque incendio amittitur, nec vi tempestatum nec temporum perturbatione 52 mutatur! Qua praediti qui sunt soli sunt divites, soli enim possident res et fructuosas et sempiternas, solique (quod est proprium divitiarum) contenti sunt rebus suis, satis esse putant quod est, nihil appetunt, nulla re egent, nihil sibi deesse sentiunt, nihil requirunt. Pecunia non olet,-a Roman emperor said that.Utinam quidem! sed non aestimatione census verum 51 victu atque cultu terminatur pecuniae modus. Wells, the narrator, Ponderevo uses the phrase to justify joining his uncle's business selling an ineffective and mildly harmful quack medicine: ". and true too was my uncle's proposition that the quickest way to get wealth was to sell the cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle. and in any case, who cares about filthy lucre?", one of the assembled captains murmurs " Non olet". In The Surgeon's Mate by Patrick O'Brian, when James Saumarez, 1st Baron de Saumarez is speaking of "glory to be picked up in the Baltic. In London Fields by Martin Amis, while smelling a wad of used £50 notes, foil Guy Clinch observes, " Pecunia non olet was dead wrong. At the time, Jack is beset with doubts about the source of his inheritance. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren (1946), protagonist Jack Burden muses that perhaps Vespasian had been right. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Die-hards, who replied by christening their new Warden Non-Olet." The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. Lewis, the Warden of Bracton College is given the nickname "Non-Olet" for having written "a monumental report on National Sanitation. Scott Fitzgerald alludes to Vespasian's jest in The Great Gatsby with the phrase "non-olfactory money". The proverb receives some attention in Roland Barthes's detailed analysis of the Balzac story in his critical study S/Z. "Vespasian's axiom" is also referred to in passing in the Balzac short story Sarrasine in connection with the mysterious origins of the wealth of a Parisian family. Vespasian's name still attaches to public urinals in Italy ( vespasiano) and France ( vespasienne). The phrase pecunia non olet is still used today to say that the value of money is not tainted by its origins. When Titus said "No", Vespasian replied, "Yet it comes from urine" ( Atqui ex lotio est). The Roman historian Suetonius reports that when Vespasian's son Titus complained about the disgusting nature of the tax, his father held up a gold coin and asked whether he felt offended by its smell ( sciscitans num odore offenderetur). It was used in tanning, wool production, and also by launderers as a source of ammonia to clean and whiten woollen togas. The urine collected from these public urinals was sold as an ingredient for several chemical processes. Vespasian imposed a urine tax on the distribution of urine from Rome's public urinals (the Roman lower classes urinated into pots, which were later emptied into cesspools). The tax was removed after a while, but it was re-enacted by Vespasian around 70 AD in order to fill the treasury. A tax on the disposal of urine was first imposed by Emperor Nero under the name of vectigal urinae in the 1st century AD.
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