In the final extant letter of his Epistulae Morales, Seneca the Younger attributes the human good to the work of cura, “care” or “concern,” before abruptly discussing how humans, unique among animals, have access to future time. This dissertation argues that Seneca’s distinctively positive conception of temporalized cura provides the pedagogical structure for the work and unites his assertions across the traditional areas of philosophy. While other studies have focused on and responded to the social aesthetics and asceticism of the “care of the self,” following Foucault’s famous formulation, this work demonstrates how Seneca draws specifically on Roman culture and myth in the figuration of care. Seneca’s language draws on the myth of the personified Cura, the creator of humanity who makes the first humans with her hands, as recorded by unique but critically neglected Latin mythographer Hyginus. In combining this story of divine handicraft with Stoic doctrines and methodology, Seneca deploys the metaphor of the hand of care to portray how moral agents create happiness by aiming at the future or fall into the grasp of outside forces by fixating on the present. Building off of previous work rehabilitating Seneca as a proper philosopher in his own right, this dissertation first defines how care operates through the image of the “hand of care” and its activity in relation to plants, non-human animals, and the divine. The ability of the hand to construct the Good out of the material of the world shapes Seneca’s portrayal of moral failure as well, as he reevaluates Roman slavery on a philosophical level in relation to the use of hands upon individuals or on one’s self. Through a reading of Hyginus’ myth in light of traditional Roman religious and mythological practice, I demonstrate how Seneca imagines the proper endpoint of the hand of care’s work: for a Roman elite male, care that is properly aimed toward the future aims to transcend nature in the philosophical embrace of death. In order to do this, Seneca creates a pedagogical program which makes textuality a medium for transmitting the care of a teacher to their student.