Procrustes
Procrustes ( Greek Προκρούστης "outreach") was a giant from Greek mythology , nickname of Polypemon or Damascus, an Attic robber in the vicinity of Eleusis and son of Poseidon .
In his world history, the ancient Greek historian Diodorus (1st century BC) reports the following about the monster and highwayman Procrustes:
Procrustes offered travelers a bed, but in some legends he also forced hikers to lie down on a bed. If they were too big for the bed, he would chop off their feet or excess limbs; if they were too small, he hammered and stretched the limbs apart by stretching them on an anvil .
Procrustes was slain by Theseus on his journey to Athens as the last of the villains on Cephisus .
The story of Procrustes gained further folkloric spread as a narrative motif in later periods. B. in appearance in the Babylonian Talmud , where Eliezer of Damascus , the house slave of Abraham, an encounter with Procrustes is attributed (Tractate Sanhedrin 109a).
A Procrustal bed or bed of the Procrustus is literally a form or a scheme into which something is forced that actually doesn't fit there.
swell
- Bakchylides 18, 19-30
- Xenophon , memorabilia 2, 1, 14
- Diodorus 4:59
- Ovid , Metamorphoses 7, 438
- Plutarch , Theseus 11, 5bc
- Hyginus , Fabulae 38
- Talmud Bablī , Sanh. 109a
literature
- Heinrich Wilhelm Stoll : Damascus . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1,1, Leipzig 1886, Col. 942-942 ( digitized version ).
- Johannes Ilberg : Polypemon . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.2, Leipzig 1909, Col. 2683-2683 ( digitized version ).
- Otto Höfer : Polypemonides . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 3.2, Leipzig 1909, Col. 2683-2689 ( digitized version ).
Web links
Remarks
- ^ Brockhaus / Wahrig, German Dictionary, Stuttgart 1983; Duden, The large dictionary of the German language, Mannheim / Vienna / Zurich 1980 and the dictionary of contemporary German, Berlin 1974, each under "Procrustes bed"