Meaning of ‘one could hardly hope for more illustrious company than Socrates’

The passage below is from A History of the Index by Dennis Duncan.

I wheel out the example of the Phaedrus not to poke fun at it, but simply because it is the ur-text in terms of our suspicions and anxieties about information technology. These fears are as old as writing itself, and they are clearly not naive – one could hardly hope for more illustrious company than Socrates. And yet, though we can perhaps appreciate the logic of the argument, who among us feels today that, as far as learning and wisdom are concerned, things went downhill after the invention of writing? Reading the Theuth story, we find, surely, a resistance in ourselves, an inability to buy into its scepticism about the value of writing. Perhaps we sense that the concept of learning itself is an adaptable one, evolving in response to the technology of its time; that what might once seem a diminution, the betrayal of an ideal, can come to be seen as essential, an ideal itself; that scholarship, rather than being timeless and immutable, is shifting and contingent, and that the questions that we ask as scholars have a lot to do with the tools at our disposal.

I have a question about the underlined part. I think I understand it literally as follows: Socrates is the best possible outstanding company that we could hope for.

But I cannot figure that ‘for what purpose’ he is the best company.

Can you help me?

Thanks in advance.