Legal Theories and Ancient Practices in John Selden’s Marmora Arundelliana

This article examines John Selden’s 1628 edition of a set of Greek inscriptions in the context of his developing legal theories and his classical scholarship. While the edition has often been studied as an exercise in specialized scholarship, this essay relates it to several of Selden’s other works as well as a broad range of ancient and early modern legal thought. I argue that the edition provides a way to understand Selden’s thinking about the intersection between political and religious obligation, methods for changing existing laws, and the distribution of goods and honors in a religious society.