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On the new season of the divided dial from On the Media, we're exploring shortwave radio, where prayer and propaganda coexist with news and conspiracy theories, and where an existential battle

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Good morning for Kaptans. Today is a special day.

Today we introduce Seneca, perhaps the second best known Stoic writer next to Marcus Aurelius,

and certainly the one with the largest body of surviving work in the Stoic tradition.

We've spent a year with Marcus, and we'll

continue to share him on Mondays, but you've been doing this long enough, you've learned enough,

to expand your knowledge and familiarity of authors beyond just Mr. Marcus.

Move over, Marcus, baby. There's a new sheriff in town.

We are going to work through Seneca's infamous letters, his epistles, to Lucilius, or to

Lusilius.

I think no matter which way you choose to pronounce it, we all know who you're talking about.

I say Lusilius.

With Seneca, we cannot take all of his letters, because, for one, all of his

letters are long. These aren't meditations, their letters, and for two, some of them are

incredibly boring, to put it bluntly. That doesn't mean they aren't worth reading on your own, but for the

purposes of this podcast, where part of my job is to make points out of the

texts and boil them down to what is useful for you, there are some I'm just going to skip.

In total, there are 124 epistles or letters, but most of the books you'll pick up,

entitled letters from a Stoic or Seneca's letters, are going to deal with a small

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