MARCHENA, a town of southern Spain, in the province of Seville, on the Cordova-Utrera and Marchena-La Roda railways. Pop. (1900), 12,468. Marchena occupies a sandy valley near the river Corbones, a left-hand territory of the Guadalquivir. Formerly it was surrounded with walls and towers, a large portion of which still remains. Among the principal buildings is the palace of the dukes of Arcos, within the enclosure of which is an ancient Moorish building, now the church of Santa Maria de la Mota. At the eastern end of the town is a sulphur spring. There is some trade in wheat, barley, olives, oil and wine. Marchena (perhaps the _Castra Gemina_ of Pliny) was taken from the Moors by St Ferdinand in 1240. MARCHENA RUIZ DE CASTRO, JOSÉ (1768-1821?), Spanish author, was born at Utrera on the 18th of November 1768 and studied with distinction at the university of Seville. He took minor orders and was for some time professor at the seminary of Vergara, but he became a convert to the doctrines of the French _philosophes_, scandalizing his acquaintances by his professions of materialism and his denunciations of celibacy. His writings being brought before the Inquisition in 1792, Marchena escaped to Paris, where he is said to have collaborated with Marat in _L'Ami du peuple_; at a later date he organized a revolutionary movement at Bayonne, returned to Paris, avowed his sympathies with the Girondists, and refused the advances of Robespierre. He acted as editor of _L'Ami des lois_ and other French journals till 1799, when he was expelled from France; he succeeded, however, in obtaining employment under Moreau, upon whose fall in 1804 he declared himself a Bonapartist. In 1808 he accompanied Murat to Spain as private secretary; in this same year he was imprisoned by the Inquisition, but was released by Joseph Bonaparte, who appointed him editor of the official _Gaceta_. In 1813 Marchena retired to Valencia, and thence to France, where he supported himself by translating into Spanish the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire and Volney. The Liberal triumph of 1820 opened Spain to him once more, but he was coldly received by the revolutionary party. He died at Madrid shortly before the 26th of February 1821. The interest of his voluminous writings is almost wholly ephemeral, but they are excellent specimens of trenchant journalism. His _Fragmentum Petronii_ (Basel, 1802), which purports to reconstruct missing passages in the current text of Petronius, is a testimony to Marchena's fine scholarship; but, by the irony of fate, Marchena is best known by his ode to Christ Crucified, which breathes a spirit of profound and tender piety.