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But in the midst of all his success, Cyrus remained self-possessed and sober-minded. “I do not like Fortune, when she smiles much,”^[182] he was accustomed to say; and at length the tide of his prosperity turned. Taking his seat one day in the Hippodrome, he was greeted with a storm of applause. “Constantine,” the vast assembly shouted, “founded the city; Cyrus restored it.” For a subject to be so popular was a crime. Theodosius took umbrage at the ovation accorded to the renovator of the city, and Cyrus was dismissed from office, deprived of his property, forced to enter the Church, and sent to Smyrna to succeed four bishops who had perished at the hands of brigands. Upon his arrival in that city on Christmas Day he found his people ill-prepared to receive him, so indignant were they that a man still counted a heathen and a heretic should have been appointed the shepherd of their souls. But a short allocution, which Cyrus delivered in honour of the festival, disarmed the opposition to him, and he spent the last years of his life in the diocese, undisturbed by political turmoils and unmolested by robbers.