Anita Arnon

And it was an awful death.

Consumption was a horrific death.

So he would have seen his mother bleeding and frothing from the mouth for days before she died.

It is a horrible, prolonged way to die.

No, you're absolutely right.

So the orphaned boy, no mother, no father, and traumatized because he's seen the way his mother has died, he's sent off to live with his grandfather.

But that doesn't last for long because then his grandfather dies.

So, you know, Simon is just faced with loss after loss after loss before he's really even 10 years old.

And most of his aunts and uncles and a sister, they die as well around him because, you know, life was precious and fragile back then.

He's wealthy, but he has nothing else.

Rodriguez might have opened the door to his curiosity, but Bolivar was, by all accounts, an autodidact who pursued learning for himself.

Like so many of the extraordinary people we cover who rise to the top of these huge empires, they're lonely, sad children who pick up books and write poetry for themselves.

This is very much the Bolivar mold too.

So he loved the classics.

He loved the politics.

Again, this is something that comes up again and again with the characters that we talk about here on Empire.

He loved the politics of ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

And as William just said, Enlightenment France, he gobbled that up.

So at 14, you've got this rather intelligent, lonely- Rich.

... who is rich, but