Greece, followed by Rome, used a new model to eventually dominate large areas. In abstract, the model seems innocent: agree to Graeco-Roman culture, provide tribute. You get to keep your culture. Provide us with supplies and we can set up trade that benefits all parties. Simple and abstract, until you add that both cultures benefited greatly from sophisticated slave capture and exploitation. Both sides of that narrative matter. Both Greece and Rome encouraged trade that fit within their system. These blogs will show how that system has evolved, remains in effect and has expanded its reach.

A Surplus Trade System

Anthony courted Cleopatra for her grain. Roman citizens received grain as a birthright. Rome constantly sought grain and other goods. Cleopatra's demise ended the Macedonian influence over Egypt. Its grain then belonged to Rome. To ensure its delivery, Roman law replaced the Macedonian control over the people of Egypt. This model played out across what turned into the "Roman Lake", aka the Mediterranean. That the Christianity that transformed Rome used Greek language after it was subsumed tells us how deeply entrenched the model had become.

"The Roman Empire's intensive demand for wood for fuel, construction, and shipbuilding led to widespread deforestation. This deforestation, combined with overgrazing and intensive farming practices, led to soil erosion and decreased crop yields. One study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews found that the empire's agricultural practices may have contributed to significant soil erosion and land degradation.

These practices led to soil erosion rates up to 10 times higher than natural rates, leading to decreased crop yields and the loss of arable land. The resulting food shortages would have contributed to social unrest and weakened the empire's military and economic power."
Key factors in the fall of the Roman Empire: unsustainable farming practices and deforestation

If this example sounds familiar, we are one step closer to the heart of the problem that still faces us. The surplus agriculture model forever demands more land, more resources. The occupants in these places are very often abstract factors, with their fate often quietly deemed from places of great comfort. Rome dangled the benefit of Roman citizenry to further encroach into territory it needed to sustain its consumption levels. Because the surplus trading model, often dependent on a few crops, eventually fails because of its inherent weaknesses, the cycle of land and resource acquirement turns eternal...until it is not.

Different Time, Different Approaches

The way out is simple: the Graeco-Roman Surplus trading model is woefully obsolete must go. Regenerative, local farming, given current resources and technology can easily replace a model that, for one thing, encourages wasteful consumption of food and resources. Food grown to solve marketing initatives is food that is not grown to sustain populations. We are on the verge of a global food crisis because the factors that created Graeco-Roman hegemony remain firmly in play: monoculure is by far the most praciced way of producing food worldwide.   

Eurasia as it exists today rests on the foundations of Graeco-Roman culture and history. Though the actual components disappeared long ago, how we live today globally points directly back to how both Greece and Rome--giving them the titles here for expediency--permanently built a system of agriculture that still dominates process and thinking across the global farming community. What the system replaced also warrants consideration, because the Graeco-Roman system still sits opposed what we often call regenerative farming. More generically it comes down to an issue of subsistence versus surplus farming. This survey takes place under the lens of the 495-year Neptune-Pluto cycle, taking us back to around 1100bce as the Iron Age began to fade.

Neptune-Pluto Cycles and the Ages of History

Roman dominance emerged from the Grecian dominance that engendered it. Before Rome existed, Greek hegemony encompassed vast areas of the seas to what is now the Iberian peninsula and many part east of it. Rome supplanted Greece. The Roman worls split into East and West, forming the foundation of tribal makeup of Eurasia. From here the Abrahamic religions helped create the intellectual and poltical structures upon which industrially focused nation-states combined into loosely formed global trading system. These sentences oversimplify of how we got to now (2026) and also describe the episodes we use Neptune-Pluto cycles to describe the transitions between these states. Yeah, this is complicated. It's going to take quite a few episodes to bring it altogether. 3500 years of history deserves some breating space. To add a Neptune-Pluto lens seemingly makes it more so, but the end result will prove opposite: in the end outer planet synodic cycles simplify the narrative.

Neptune-Pluto Cycles are long in human terms: 495 years, give or take 2-3 years. So why blog about a cycle that way exceeds our lifetimes? Perspective.

Cycles within Cycles

 
Every 495-year Neptune-Pluto cycle contains four Uranus-Pluto and three Uranus-Neptune cycles. 
The synodic cycle between Neptune and Pluto is a little different. The span of the first and third phases 
last 172 years; the second and fourth, 72 years.

Measuring Current History Blogs bring the context of outer planet cycles to realm of periodical reporting.

Everyday seems much more difficult than it used to be. Perhaps the holistic historical perspective of Measuring History can complement our worldview. Might work and probably will change quite a bit over time. In short, research on topics such as The 2040s are Already Here, The Impending Calamity of the Early 20th Century, and The Paradox of Progress at the least gives background to this type of reporting.