come full circle

Example: “She started her career at this newspaper, and now, as its editor, she's come full circle.”

Origin: The wheel in question is Fortune's. The rota Fortunae — a wheel turned by the goddess Fortune, lifting people to prosperity and carrying them back down without regard to merit — was one of the governing images of medieval European thought, transmitted above all by Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy in the sixth century and reproduced endlessly in manuscripts, sermons, and poetry. A full revolution returns the rider to where they began, which is the whole moral of it. Shakespeare gives the phrase its English form in King Lear, first performed around 1606, where the dying Edmund says the wheel is come full circle. The modern use has lost the fatalism but kept the shape: arriving back at the starting point after a long passage.