For Homer was not only in a very important sense the historian of his race; he was, above all, the expositor of its ideas.
There is involved in the very structure of the Greek epics the fundamental conception of life as the Greeks looked at it; their view of reverence, worship, law, obligation, subordination, personality.

No one can be said to have read these poems in any real sense until he has made these ideas clear to himself; and these ideas carry with them a definite enlargement of thought.

When a man has gotten a clear view of the ideas about life held by a great race, he has gone a long way towards self-education,--so rich and illuminative are these central conceptions around which the life of each race has been organised.

To multiply these ideas by broad contact with the books of life is to expand one's thought so as to compass the essential thought of the entire race.

And this is precisely what the man of broad culture accomplishes; he emancipates himself from whatever is local, provincial, and temporal, by gaining the power of taking the race point of view.