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What makes you think that the languages sounded more similar in a time when communication was much slower and regional dialects could develop easily without outside influence?

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Because the net difference between dialects are the sum of all differences from 2000 years ago to now, while 2000 years ago, less time was elapsed, the net difference was much smaller.

The net difference today is the net difference 2000 years ago plus all the new variations since then.

For the same reason that English and Swedish sounded much more similar a long time ago, when communication was slow, than they do now -- they are descended from a common source, and at the time of that source they would obviously have been identical.

After the time of the source, shortly after diverging[1], they would still have been more similar than they are now because they hadn't had much time to differentiate.

[1] Unlike "the time of the source", you can rigorously defend the existence of the period shortly after divergence.

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