If Orion Books had just found and published one of the “lost” Shakespeare plays — Cardenio, perhaps, or Love’s Labours Won — or the supposedly destroyed second part of Gogol’s Dead Souls, I could not have been more excited than when I learnt of the publication of 14 previously untranslated Asterix stories in a new book called Asterix and the Class Act.

I’ll go further: if it turned out that the library at Alexandria had not burnt down after all and that all the books inside (including Moses’ own juvenile comic novella about the bawdy adventures of a young Jew growing up parentless in a big modern city) were to be found at Waterstone’s in Hampstead, I would burn them anew to save a napkin of working doodles from Asterix and the Cauldron or The Mansions of the Gods.

Because, you see, the Asterix books, or at least the 24 Asterix books written before the death of René Goscinny in 1977, represent the very summit of our achievement as a literary race. Goscinny was free to die because, with Asterix in Belgium completed, his principal oeuvre now comprised 24 books — the same number as its twin at the other end of literary history, The Odyssey. What Homer began, in terms of vernacular epic, Goscinny and Albert Uderzo finished.

The eight books cobbled together since then by the artist Uderzo alone have been as rubber bones to starving dogs — puerile, improbable, banal. As Peter Kessler, the author of The Complete Guide to Asterix, put it to me recently: “The problem is that Uderzo never really understood what had been created in Asterix. He hasn’t been able to cope with the endless reinvention that a series needs to remain great. And so he has fallen back on repetition and silliness.”

That is what makes Class Act so important. For some of the stories, such as the 1960s fragments Mini Midi Maxi, Springtime in Gaul and The Obelix Family Tree, return us briefly to that Golden Age when cultured men could still look into the future with some hope for the survival of literature.

Perhaps you think I hyperbolise. That I speak, somehow, in jest. I do not. I contend that in Asterix one finds all of man’s literary project finally realised. More than that, one finds all of human life.

To begin: like the very first novels, the Asterix books pass themselves off as real history, personal glosses on otherwise well-known facts — one thinks of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and, earlier still, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, even Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. And, like Don Quixote, Asterix questions the very values that history has handed down to us. When, aged nine, I heard my Latin teacher declare that by 50BC all Gaul had been conquered, I cried out: “No, Sir. One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the Roman invaders.” OK, I was a slow developer. But the point is valid.

At the dawn of demotic prose fiction, copious classical allusion was a crucial part of the attempt to dignify English as a literary language. Asterix is the only modern genre that keeps that tradition alive. The bandy-legged old pirate who always ends in the soup (with the patch-eyed captain and the Numidian lookout) never fails to offer one of the gnomic consolations of ancient misericord. “O Tempora! O Mores!”, he will opine as the ship goes down, or “video meliora proboque deteriora sequor” or “vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas”.

Virgil, as it happens, has his best moment in 2,000 years when, in Asterix the Legionary, Asterix and Obelix go to the garrison town of Condatum to inquire after their friend, Tragicomix, whom they fear has been pressed into service for Caesar’s African campaign. The clerk looks up from his marble slab and asks: “Tragicomix with a ‘T’, as in timeo Danaos et dona ferentes?”

You think Balzac is the great roman-fleuvier of the French? You think that La Comédie Humaine, with its Eugénie Grandets and its Père Goriots, in some way reflects all of life? Pah! It is a cartoonish footnote in the history of multi-volume fiction when you look at the comprehensiveness of the Asterix books. Here we have every rung of the nobility from Chief Vitalstatistix to Cleopatra and every military rank from infantryman to general, fully rounded, fully realised. There are labourers (Obelix), craftsmen (the blacksmith, Fulliautomatix), merchants (from Ekonomikrisis, the Phoenician import-export man, to Unhygienix the village fishmonger), medical professionals such as the druid Getafix and occultists like Prolix the soothsayer. There are strong women like Impedimenta, 93-year-olds such as Geriatrix, toddlers aplenty and the troubled teenager Justforkix. Not to mention the highwaymen, cart thieves and pirates, musicians and actors, salesmen and spies and, in Dogmatix, history’s most important dog.

There is high art (pastiches of work by Breughel, Géricault, Rembrandt, Doré, Rodin) and there is film (Fellini’s Satyricon satirised, Sean Connery appearing as agent Dubbelosix, Laurel and Hardy as legionaries and a horrid cameo from Kirk Douglas). There is an appearance by the Beatles and mention of the Rolling Menhirs. There is advertising (“It’s the right one, it’s not the light one . . . it’s a menhir!”) and there is politics, with appearances from the Viking Chief, Haraldwillsen, and a young Jacques Chirac (then Mayor of Paris). All of this on a narrative canvas that covers locations all over northern and southern Europe, America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

You think Dickens was good at names? Well, to your Wopsles, Dedlocks, Gummidges, and Gradgrinds, I offer the quisling chief Whosemoralsarelastix, the British cousin Anticlimax, the Spanish chief Huevos y Bacon, the Egyptian Ptenisnet, and such Romans as Crismusbonus, Noxiousvapus, Vexatius Sinusitus, and Raucoushallelujahchorus.

You talk of the emergence of Magical Realism in the late 1960s as a powerful movement in the revivification of the novel? I show you Asterix, at the beginning of that decade, using the trope of a “magic potion” to level the playing field on which a mighty Empire encounters the disempowered plebeia. Borges and Marquez never managed that.

You mention the linguistic agility of Joyce, the neologistic impulse that elided whole histories and nations and cultures into sentence-long single coinages? I show you Asterix’s friend, the Corsican tribal leader, Boneywasawarriorwayayix, and rest my case.

The fact that the books were written originally in French is no matter. I have read them all in many languages and, like all great literature, they are best in English. Who outside the Iberian peninsula would deny that Cervantes’ Don Quixote is inferior to Smollet’s, or that Chaucer’s De Consolatione Philosophiae is jollier than that of Boethius? In the same way, Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, Asterix’s translators since the very beginning, have made great books into eternal flames.

As always happens with timeless art, the Asterix story has been taken as an analogy for many things. Some say the village’s resistance to the Romans is a metaphor for French resistance to the Nazis. Others choose to see a lesson about resisting European federalisation or holding out against American economic imperialism. But there is no doubt that on days when you feel like an unmarried midget of uncertain age struggling to resist invisible evils (and we all have days like that), half an hour alone with an Asterix book is a tonic as potent as any magic potion.

Asterix and the Class Act, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, is published by Orion, £9.99. Offer, £8.99 plus 89p p&p (0870-180 8080)