Note 1 — CANTO I. OURSELF!
Reading edition
I once stood high on Fortune’s ladder.
Although Dame Fortuna was, by ancient mythologists, represented as a whimsical being, cutting her capers on the periphery of a large wheel, I am justified in accommodating her goddesship with a ladder, by virtue of a figure in rhetoric called Poetica Licentia (anglice) poets’ licentiousness.