The Inspired Friend
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Socrates — ἐγγύθεν ἡ εὔνοια γιγνομένη τοῦ ἐρῶντος ἐκπλήττει τὸν ἐρώμενον διαισθανόμενον… πρὸς τὸν ἔνθεον φίλον.
Once the beloved has let the lover near, proximity does its work: 'up close,' engythen, the lover's eunoia — his goodwill — begins to astonish the young man. Eunoia is a plain, warm word, literally 'good-mindedness,' the well-wishing at the root of friendship; but the verb Socrates attaches to it is anything but plain. The beloved is not merely pleased, he is 'astonished,' ekplēttei — struck out of himself, the same shock-word the palinode uses for the soul thunderstruck by beauty. And what he discerns, diaisthanomenos — perceiving it clearly, through and through — is that all his other friends and relatives put together offer no real share of friendship next to this one companion. The reason is packed into the passage's last two words: this is an entheos philos, an 'inspired friend' — a friend with a god inside him.
The beloved has let the lover close — accepted his conversation and company. Now, at close range, the lover's genuine goodwill begins to work on him. He is astonished to discover that all his other friends and family together do not offer a fraction of what this one 'inspired' friend does, and he begins to be drawn in.
The whole force of this passage gathers into its final phrase, entheos philos, the 'inspired friend,' and to feel its weight you have to hear what entheos meant. Literally 'having a god within,' it is the ancestor of our word 'enthusiasm' — but where we use that for ordinary eagerness, the Greeks meant something awesome and slightly dangerous: the condition of a person filled and moved by a divinity not their own. The priestess is entheos when the god speaks through her; the poet is entheos when the Muse sings in him. Socrates began this entire speech by arguing that the madness of love is not a sickness but one of the four god-sent forms of divine mania, and here, hundreds of lines later, he redeems that promise in a single adjective. What overwhelms the beloved is not the lover's charm or usefulness; it is that he senses, in this one person, the nearness of a god. That is why the passage can make so extravagant a claim — that the inspired friend outweighs every other friend and all one's kin combined. Ordinary philia, the affection of family and companions that Aristotle would later anatomize so carefully, is a human good exchanged between human beings. This is something else: a friendship in which one party carries the divine and the other feels it. And notice the direction the passage is quietly turning. Up to now the lover has been the one seized, maddened, transformed by the beloved's beauty. Now the astonishment crosses over. The beloved begins to be struck in his turn — and the next lines will complete the circuit, showing love flowing back from the lover into the beloved like a reflection returning to its source. What begins here as the beloved's amazement will become, in a moment, his own answering love.
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