Bill - you may have seen this already, but AHD gives the etymology of this word as:
from Latin Procrustes, from Greek Prokrousts,from prokrouein, hammer out, to stretch out : pro-, forth; see pro–2 + krouein, to beat.
So, as odd as it sounds, it appears that Proctrustes method may have been more like flattening and rolling out dough, or even pounding out a soft metal, rather than stretching with a screw-driven rack.
On the whole Archimedes question, I recently read One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (I swear, I do have a life) by the vowel-deprived Witold Rybczynski. It's a short, interesting book about the provenance of these two items, which the author views as the most important tools to have appeared in the last millennium. I guess there were screw-threaded devices before then, like Archimedes' water-lifter, and others for pressing olive oil, but they don't go back much further than Archimedes. Which bears out Bill's point that there was no screwing around during the actual® life time of the mythical Procrustes.
p.s. - in thinking about it - you don't need a screw for a rack, just a wheel, around which a cable or chain could be tightened, and some sort of peg or ratchet to hold the wheel in position. Time to stop designing torture devices in my head now...
