When I teach real world history, I sometimes do something similar. Like, “Socrates was very roughly as far away from Homer as we are from Milton,” and that sort of thing. It can help give some context and a sense of the movement of time, though it also obscures the fact that we’re in many ways closer to Milton than Socrates was to Homer just because we have better records and a larger corpus of written history, etc. Still: people have a natural tendency to telescope “ancient times” into a small window, as if Plato and Homer were building the pyramids in order to hide in them from dinosaurs.
This just seems like a similar exercise, but with fiction.
