Putting 256 BC on an ancient timescale

Putting 256 BC beside both the present and other parts of antiquity shows how distant the battle was. At Ecnomus, some Egyptian pyramids were already roughly two millennia old, about as remote to Rome and Carthage as their world is to us. The comparison warns against compressing every ancient society into one undifferentiated era. Rome and Carthage belonged to a historically unfamiliar world whose institutions have to be reconstructed on their own terms.