Procrustes

"Damastes" redirects here. For the spider genus, see Damastes (spider).

For the Larry Niven story, see Procrustes (short story). For the statistical analysis technique, see Procrustes analysis.

Theseus and Procrustes, Attic red-figure neck-amphora, 570–560 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2325)

In Greek mythology, Procrustes (Προκρούστης) or "the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]", also known as Prokoptas or Damastes (Δαμαστής) "subduer", was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who physically attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed. In general, when something is Procrustean, different lengths or sizes or properties are fitted to an arbitrary standard.

In Greek mythology

In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis. There he had a bed, in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith's hammer, to stretch them to fit. In later tellings, if the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length; nobody ever fit the bed exactly. Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, travelling to Athens along the sacred way, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed:

He killed Damastes, surnamed Procrustes, by compelling him to make his own body fit his bed, as he had been wont to do with those of strangers. And he did this in imitation of Heracles. For that hero punished those who offered him violence in the manner in which they had plotted to serve him.

Killing Procrustes was Theseus's last adventure on his journey from Troezen to Athens.

Cultural references

"It is impossible to establish universal uniformity of hours without inflicting very serious injury to workers."—Motion at the recent Trades' Congress. Cartoon from the Project Gutenberg eBook of Punch, Volume 101, 19 September 1891, by John Tenniel

A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced. In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter", the private detective Dupin uses the metaphor of a Procrustean bed to describe the Parisian police's overly rigid method of looking for clues. Jacques Derrida, in "The Purveyor of Truth", his response to Jacques Lacan's seminar on "The Purloined Letter" (1956), applies the metaphor to the structural analysis of texts: "By framing in this violent way, by cutting the narrated figure itself from a fourth side in order to see only triangles, one evades perhaps a certain complication." This is one of deconstruction's central critiques of structural (and formal) literary analysis.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms is a 2010 book by philosopher and probability theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile.

Procrustes analysis is the process of performing a shape-preserving Euclidean transformation to a set of shapes. This removes variations in translation, rotation and scaling across the dataset in order to move them into a common frame of reference. This is generally the precursor to further statistical analysis. A related problem in linear algebra is the orthogonal Procrustes problem of finding the closest orthogonal matrix to any given matrix.

A Procrustean solution is the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived structure.

In a Procrustean solution in statistics, instead of finding the best fit line to a scatter plot of data, one first chooses the line one wants, then selects only the data that fits it, disregarding data that does not, so to "prove" some idea. It is a form of rhetorical deception made to forward one set of interests at the expense of others. The unique goal of the Procrustean solution is not win-win, but rather that Procrustes wins and the other loses. In this case, the defeat of the opponent justifies the deceptive means.

In computer science, a Procrustean string is a fixed length string into which strings of varying lengths are placed. If the string inserted is too short, then it is padded out, usually with spaces or null characters. If the string inserted is too long, it is truncated. The concept is mentioned in the Sinclair ZX81 and Sinclair Spectrum user manuals, where a portion of a string is replaced by another string using Procrustean assignment—the replacement string is truncated or padded in order to have length equal to the portion being replaced. Although the term did not catch on in wider usage, it appears in some references, notably FOLDOC.

The film editor Walter Murch refers, not entirely negatively, to a certain style of film editing as "procrustean". If the first assembly of a film is too long by a certain amount, that amount is removed quickly, sometimes brutally. Then the film is viewed at this new length, and progress afterwards is aimed at smoothing out the amputations without adding length.

See also

• Ergonomics
• Generalized Procrustes analysis
• One size fits all
• Procrustes analysis

Ancient Sources

• Apollodorus, Epitome I 4.
• Diodorus of Sicily, Bibliotheca historia IV 59.5.
• Gaius Iulius Hyginus, Fabulae XXXVIII.
• Pausanias, Beschrijving van Griekenland I 38.5.
• Plutarch, Theseus 11.
• Xenophon, Memorabilia II 1.14.

References

Notes

External links

• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons