Plato talks about friendship directly in Lysis, however, Eros is a big part of how love and affection are shared in Plato’s ideology. Eros is translated as erotic love, and this is a range of how love is shown. While never directly stated in any of his dialogs, it can be interpreted that Eros includes friendship. Plato through Socrates discusses in a couple of dialogs (Symposium and Phaedrus) the ideas of beauty, sexual attraction, and love as a part of Eros. For Plato, these concepts are all connected to friendship. In order to look at Plato’s concept of friendship, we have to examine the dialog of Lysis.
While Lysis is not a very common dialog of Plato, it does examine the idea of friendship between two potential lovers. The entire dialog is questioning the nature of friendship and how it starts. Socrates goes on to discuss four hypotheses; you cannot prove friendship with your love, the good can only be friends with the good, a good friend is neutral and supports other good people