ancient mediterranean

Hello. I'm an Ancient History student and this is my first thread. I still don't understand very well how alternatehistory.com works, but I'll try my best to make my story look decent. I would also like to apologize for my terrible English, so if at some point you don't understand something...

This was a bit of a dumb idea that came into my head a few days ago and I decided to try and map out what it might look like. The map I made is apparently too large to post here but I did put it up on reddit in r/althistory if you want to have a look (link at the bottom). This is my first time...

While the Phoenicians had an enormous impact on the Mediterranean world, their culture is dead. Your challenge is to keep it alive in some form.

Much like potatoes in Northern Europe, tomatoes are such a staple of Mediterranean cuisine that it's easy to forget they only started eating them after the Columbian exchange. Up until very late 15th century - at the absolute earliest - there were no tomatoes in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece...

Could the rise of Rome have occurred much earlier than OTL? If Rome became independent from the Etruscans earlier, and started waging campaigns of expansion 100, 200 years earlier, could they have obtained a sort of dominance over the Mediterranean Basin that they enjoyed under Emperor Augustus...