The Italian word for ‘career’, carriera, had become associated with a working life or employment from the mid-1600s, long before its English equivalent acquired the same sense in the early nineteenth century. In fact the first attested use of carriera in this way was in association with the profession of literature. In the preface to his Trattato dell'arte e dello stile del dialogo (1662), the historian and poet Pietro Sforza Pallavicino expressed his thanks to the Bishop of Fermo for encouraging his ‘childhood in the career of letters’ (la mia puerizia nella carriera delle lettere).

Carriera, like the Latin via carraria from which it derives, originally denoted a ‘carriage road’ or track for a wheeled vehicle (carrus). The meaning turns out to have a felicitous bearing on the idea of the literary career which is unlikely to be coincidence: in the middle ages, the most influential literary career of all was visualized as a wheel – the rota Vergilii or rota Vergiliana (‘the Wheel of Virgil’.) An arrangement of the poet's works and their respective themes and styles in a circular diagram seems to have developed from the use of rota as synecdoche for the Classical image of the Muses' chariot, an image mediated by the schoolmasters of late antiquity. And when Virgil conceives his poetic cursus as a military triumph at the opening of Georgics Book 3, he envisages himself as a victor, crowned with palms, who will set a hundred chariots in motion.