There are eleven torques in Señor Ciceron’s unique collection, and eight of them are of gold. That gentleman assured me that he might have had many more had the little shepherd boys who stumble across them in the neighbouring hills better understood their value. Some think that these torques date from the days of the ancient Iberians, and that they were worn as necklaces by the chiefs of tribes. But their great weight and their enormous size make me somewhat doubtful of this theory. Some of them have been pronounced by Señor Villa-Amil to be very like the Gallo-Roman specimens in the Louvre collection. Those in the Dublin Museum are much thinner, and altogether less massive. The two in the _Kunsthistorisches Museum_ at Vienna are yoke-shaped, they are laid one inside the other; both are silver bordered. It is curious that the ancient Irish should have had torques of gold so similar to those that are now being found in Galicia. Joyce tells us that in a legend in the _Book of Leinster_, Credrie, the great artificer, was drowned _while bringing golden ore from Spain_; and a poem in the same book speaks of “torques of gold from foreign lands.” Geraldus reported in the thirteenth century that the Irish were too idle to work their own gold mines. “Even gold, of which they require large quantities, and which they desire so eagerly as to indicate their Spanish origin, is brought hither by merchants.”[214] Torcs or Muntorcs (necktorcs) seem to have been much in vogue with the ancient Irish; they were often mentioned in their literature. Joyce describes them thus: “The torque was formed of a single square or triangular bar of gold, from which the metal had been hollowed out along the flat sides, so as to leave four or three ribbons along the corners, after which it was twisted into a spiral shape, something like a screw with four or three threads. There is one in the museum only half made, having three leaves or ribbons the whole length untwisted....” This writer says of those in the Dublin Museum, that some are barely the size of the neck, others so large that when worn they extended over the breast almost to the shoulders, and he reminds his readers that the Dying Gladiator has a torque round his neck (a fact first noticed, he says, by Robert Ball, LL.D.).