Procrustean bed

Did You Know?

• Procrustes was a son of Poseidon.
• Procrustes had a son named Sinis, by Sylea, who was also captured and killed by Theseus.

Mythology

Procrustes had a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis. There he kept a bed and invited every passer-by to spend the night. If the guest was too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length; if too short, he would stretch them until they died. No one ever fit the bed exactly. Theseus, traveling to Athens along the sacred way, captured Procrustes and forced him to fit his own bed, killing him in imitation of Heracles. This was Theseus's last adventure on his journey from Troezen to Athens.

Cultural references

Edgar Allan Poe's detective Dupin uses the metaphor of a Procrustean bed to describe the Parisian police's rigid method of searching for clues in "The Purloined Letter." Jacques Derrida applies the metaphor to structural analysis of texts, arguing that cutting a narrated figure to see only triangles evades a certain complication, a central critique of structural literary analysis. Slavoj Žižek critiques poetic form by saying that a sonnet forces free speech into a Procrustean bed of fixed rhythm and rhyme. Poet Hollis Robbins uses the metaphor to structure a sonnet about cutting lines to fit meter and rhyme. Thomas Jefferson employed the metaphor in a paper on religious freedom, arguing that coercing uniformity is like introducing the bed of Procrustus, lopping the large and stretching the small. The Talmud in Sanhedrin 109b 5 uses the concept to understand the sins of Sodom, describing beds where guests were cut or stretched to fit. Eurosceptics invoke the Procrustean bed to describe the relationship between the Eurozone and its member states.