Procrustes never adjusted the bed

One bed, or two

Procrustes was a robber who worked the road into Attica. Plutarch names him Damastes, surnamed Procrustes, and places him at Erineus. There Theseus killed him on the way to Athens, by compelling him to make his own body fit his bed, as he had done to strangers.² The surname is the nickname the deed earned: from the Greek prokrouein, to beat out or stretch out, Procrustes is the stretcher.³

The sources disagree on the bed. In Plutarch there is one, and each guest is forced to its length.² In Pseudo-Apollodorus there are two, a short bed and a long one. He lays the tall on the short bed and saws off what hangs over. The short he lays on the long bed and hammers out to fill it.⁴ Apollodorus gives him a third name too, Polypemon.⁴ The two-bed version is the sharper one, because it takes away the last defense: no guest is ever the right size, and the bed is the point. Merriam-Webster's own etymology folds the pair back into a single bed, on which the too-tall are cut down and the too-short stretched.¹

The adjective arrives twice

English took in the man before it took in the adjective. The noun Procrustes is recorded by 1581, in a translation by John Studley.⁵ The adjective procrustean is first attested in 1647, but only in the plain sense of relating to Procrustes.¹⁵ The meaning the word is reached for now — forcing a case to an arbitrary standard — is younger. Etymonline dates that figurative sense to 1822, with the variant spelling Procrustian already in 1776.³ Before the 1820s, then, procrustean meant only that something had to do with the myth. After, it could carry the myth's method as a charge and be understood.

When "strict" is the honest word

Reach for procrustean and you usually mean strict, or standardized, or rigid. None is quite it. A strict rule can be a fair rule strictly applied. Procrustean says something narrower: the standard is arbitrary, one party sets it, and the case is cut to fit the standard rather than the standard adjusted to the case.¹

Clark rejects a fixed formula run onto every set of facts, whatever the facts. Ronald Krotoszynski makes the same charge in 2021, arguing that much of contemporary First Amendment law resembles a Procrustean bed, its bright-line tests forcing unlike speech cases into shapes decided in advance.⁷ In both the fault is the shape of the standard, not its severity: a frame the facts were never cut for, imposed anyway. When a standard is fair and the enforcement only firm, strict is the honest word. When the bed was built to fit no one, procrustean is the only word that says so.