The arrangement at first met with universal approval. The towns were relieved of the presence of disorderly soldiers in the streets, and on the occasion of a riot the soldiers could be depended on to act together and preserve order; they were not united by various ties of familiarity with the rioters. The fact that a new force had been created which could be used to coerce the Government escaped notice at first, and Sejanus was held to be a public benefactor. He further achieved some measure of popularity by his energy and skill in stopping the spread of a conflagration which originated in the theatre of Pompeius, and the grateful Senate voted that his statue, magnificently gilded, should be set up in the place where he had saved the lives of the citizens. When Drusus died Tiberius was sixty-five years of age. Nothing had occurred to shake his confidence in Sejanus. At home and abroad the Government seemed to be strong and settled, and the Emperor felt that he was at liberty to withdraw himself from any but the most urgent public business. Tacitus and the authorities whom he followed accused Tiberius, with their customary animosity, of mere hypocrisy when he talked of abdicating; they forgot that he had once before retired from public life, and only been brought back to it with difficulty, and that, in accepting the cares of the Empire, he had expressed a hope that the Senate would one day allow him a period of rest in his old age. From this time he, in fact, began tentatively to absent himself from Rome and to avoid public functions. Eventually, in A.D. 26, he finally withdrew to the island of Capreæ, and though he sometimes approached the city, never entered it again. Meanwhile Sejanus acted as his Regent at Rome. We are now approaching the great tragedy of the reign of Tiberius, a tragedy whose details will never be made clear unless some happy investigator in the libraries of a monastery or the sands of Egypt should recover for us the missing books and chapters of Tacitus, and other authors whose works we have lost.