Procrustes - Derived meanings

In the legend of Theseus, a robber, living in Attica, who made travellers lie on his bed, and either cut or lengthened them to fit it; his name means ‘the stretcher’. Theseus gave him the same treatment, and killed him.

In Greek mythology, Procrustes (the stretcher), also known as Damastes (subduer) and Polypemon (harming much), was a bandit from Attica. Nobody would ever fit in the bed because it was secretly adjustable: Procrustes would stretch or shrink it upon sizing his victims from afar. Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed and cut off his head and feet (since Theseus was a stout fellow, the bed had been set on the short position). Killing Procrustes was the last adventure of Theseus on his journey from Troezen to Athens.

Derived meanings

A Procrustean bed is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced. Sometimes the term is applied to the pan and scan process of cropping motion pictures for television and home video.

Procrustes analysis is the name for the process of performing a shape-preserving Euclidean transformation to a set of shapes.

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.