The conversion to Christianity took place gradually and unevenly in late antiquity and in the early Byzantine world. Customary funeral rituals remained. These included the belief that at the time of death angels and demons contest for the decedent's soul. Macarius of Egypt writes of such a contest, which is only resolved by the intervention of the person's guardian angel -roughly equivalent to Plato's "daimon". A second belief was that the soul was weighed in the scales of justice; a concept that Eustathius of Thessalonica found in the "Iliad". Both ideas precipitated loud lamentation, which Gregory of Nyssa and others attempted to modify to the singing of psalms and hymns.