The original question turns out to be a bit fuzzy and Stilwell's answer is potentially misleading. ThereThere are actually twovarious flavors of "neusis constructions"neusis construction. In the weakerweakest flavor, each ofin addition to having the marked straightedge pass through the pole point, the two marks on the neusis straightedge must be constrainedit are required to lie along, one each, on two specified lines; we might call that tool a line -- in particularline-line neusis. For a line-circle neusis, not alongone mark must lie on a specified line while the other must lie on a specified circle. It For a circle-circle neusis, the two marks must lie, one each, on two specified circles. (We view a line as a special case of a circle; so each of these tools is this weaker flavorat least as powerful as its predecessors.)
If we allow ourselves a straightedge, a compass, and a line-line neusis, then, as Stillwell tells us, we get precisely the closure of constructionthe rationals under complex square roots and cube roots. The Alperin paper that Stillwell mentions is referred toa high-level reference. Here are some more details.
In one direction, consider the line through the pole point that has slope $s$. We can intersect that line with the two specified lines. The distance between the two resulting intersections equals the fixed distance between the two marks on the straightedge just when a certain quartic equation in $s$ holds. And, of course, any quartic can be solved using complex square roots and cube roots.
In the Alperin paper;other direction, the compass allows us to bisect any angle and thisto extract any real square root; so we can take complex square roots. To show that the line-line neusis can take complex cube roots, we need to show two things: that it can trisect any angle and that it can extract any real cube root.
Trisecting first: There is a well-known neusis angle-trisection credited to Archimedes; but that construction uses a line-circle neusis, and hence doesn't help us here. But the flavorGreeks also knew of a trisection using a line-line neusis. Alperin credits that construction to Apollonius, but gives no details. For the details, see either A History of Greek Mathematics, Volume 1: From Thales to Euclid, by Sir Thomas Heath, reprinted by Dover in 1981, pages 236-238. Or see Exercise 10 on page 245 of Michael O'Leary's Revolutions in Geometry, published by Wiley in 2010. (Note that can extract both square roots, in this construction, of the four slopes for the neusis straightedge that satisfy the distance requirement, all four are real; one is trivial and should be ignored, while the other three are the three trisectors.)
Now for real cube roots: The Greeks also knew a line-line neusis construction, but no morecredited to Nicomedes, for extracting real cube roots. So it One source for that construction, pointed out by Gerry Myerson, is the article "Constructions using a compass and twice-notched sraightedge", by Arthur Baragar, pages 151-164 in volume 109, number 2 of the American Mathematical Monthly. (In this weaker flavor thatconstruction, of the four slopes mentioned above, one is trivial and should be ignored, a second gives the required real cube root, and the remaining two are complex.)
So the line-line neusis gives us precisely the power to solve quadratic and cubic (and hence also quartic) equations, which makes it equivalent to "conic constructability" (which Baragar callsor, as the Greeks called it, "solid constructability").
InWhat about the stronger flavorother flavors of neusis construction? Baragar shows that, each mark may be constrained to lie alongfor either a line-circle neusis or a circle. The Baragar article shows-circle neusis, there are in general six slopes for the line through the pole that have the stronger flavor is strictly more powerfulproper distance relationship -- six, rather than the weaker flavorfour of the line-line case. In particular He then gives an explicit example of a line-circle neusis construction in which one of these slopes is real and trivial, three others are real, and the stronger flavor can constructfinal two are complex. Furthermore, the five nontrivial slopes are the roots of a numberirreducible quintic equation whose extension field over the rationals has degree divisible by 5; so that numberGalois group is all of $S_5$, and which hence cannot be constructed bysolved with radicals. Thus, the weaker flavorline-circle neusis is a strictly more powerful tool than the line-line neusis.
Note thatAs an upper bound on the famous Archimedes neusis trisectionpower of these more general neusis constructions, Baragar shows that any point generated by either the angle constrains one ofline-circle neusis or the two marks to lie along a circle, so it is-circle neusis lies in an extension field of the stronger flavor. But the results above implyrationals that an angle can also be trisected using some neusis constructionreached by a tower of fields in which each adjacent pair has index either 2, 3, 5, or 6. So the weaker flavorjump in power over the line-line neusis, where the adjacent-pair indices are either 2 or 3, is not too great.
Baragar's paper closes with some interesting open problems. One problem that he doesn't mention is this: Is the circle-circle neusis strictly more powerful than the line-circle neusis?