When protesters in Portland faced federal agents in full military gear, some chose to meet force not with confrontation but with absurdity, appearing as frogs, dinosaurs, and unicorns. Kirk Ormand, classicist at Oberlin College, explores how turning vulnerability into spectacle can become a form of power in itself. Drawing on lessons from ancient satire to modern street protest, he argues that self‑mockery and play can expose the fragility of authority—and challenge the logic that strength must always look strong.

When President Trump sent the National Guard to Portland over the objections of Oregon Governor Tina Kotek this fall, he characterized the city as “war-torn” and declared that the ICE facilities there were “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” The President’s characterization of the city as a “burning hellhole” was met by confusion from the local residents, and then widespread derision on late-night television and in the national media.

Portlanders, however, took things a bit further: first, they organized an emergency naked bicycle ride. And then the protests outside the ICE facility took an amusing and somewhat surreal bent: protesters began showing up in inflatable nylon costumes. Beginning with a single larger-than-life frog, the peaceful dissidents began arriving dressed as dinosaurs, unicorns, pickles, bananas, raccoons, chickens, sharks, and ultimately more frogs. The Portland Frog Brigade began to attract national media attention.

In showing up costumed as large, puffy, non-threatening cartoon animals, Portlanders were (I presume unknowingly) participating in a form of protest that has deep roots in the traditions of the West. We can see similar forms of comic critique in the poetry of ancient Greece. My argument in this piece is that this kind of protest—acknowledging one’s own vulnerability in the face of a formidable enemy—can be an effective tool in the arsenal of contemporary protesters who face an increasingly brutal and authoritarian government.

The comedies of Aristophanes are well-known: the 5^th-century BCE Athenian playwright relentlessly criticized the perceived overreach of certain Athenian politicians in his work. Many of his plays are named after their costumed choruses, which sometimes consisted of animals including, perhaps coincidentally, the Frogs. But I want to go back even earlier than that, to a poet from the Greek island of Paros living in the 7^th century BCE: Archilochos, our first known practitioner of a form of poetry called iambic.

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Archilochos’ choice [is] to adopt a position of powerlessness: that of an ant, or a cicada, caught in the machinery of much larger power.

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Archilochos’ poetry is known for invective, in which he relentlessly attacks his enemies, most famously a man named Lycambes. These attacks take the form of a nasty, biting humor. Archilochos enacts his revenge on his opponents by making fun of them, with the goal of bringing about public shame; often his humor also includes a risqué sexual element. The 12^th-century CE Byzantine scholar Eustathius tells us that Archilochos was known for his use of jeering and public mocking. Now, I must admit that most of the fragments that we have of Archilochos are not all that funny (though some are downright obscene). But in two of the fragments—often considered pieces of a single poem—in which Archilochos attacks his co-islander Lycambes, he says:

Father Lycambes, what sort of thing have you said?

  Who has stolen your wits,

to which you were previously attached? But now you are a

   huge joke among the townsfolk.

You have turned your back on a great oath

    with respect to salt and table… (frr. 172-173)

A few elements of this poem are important to highlight for our 21^st-century moment. One is the basic observation that, through this poem, a violation of public norms is met with public shame. Whether or not Lycambes already was “a huge joke among the townsfolk,” he becomes one at least in part because he has been called out in this poem by Archilochos. In other words, the poem utters the truth about Lycambes by bringing about its own result.

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Two other elements of Archilochos’ invective are critical for our understanding. First, Archilochos always positions himself, as in the fragment quoted above, as a populist, speaking up in defense of community values. His beef with Lycambes seems to have been personal, and may have involved Lycambes breaking a promise that Archilochos would be allowed to marry one of his daughters. But the poem positions this as a violation of the social rules by which he and the townspeople lived; such oaths are not to be broken. Second, Archilochos also seems to position himself as relatively powerless, even helpless. In a fragment that we have only as reported by the 2^nd-century CE satirist Lucian, Archilochos tells a tormentor that he has “caught a cicada by the wing”—the point being that, as a cicada, he may be caught, but he will continue to cry out, raising public awareness of his helpless situation, and the wrong done to him.

In another poem, Archilochos adopts the character of one lacking in authority, but not entirely helpless:

Perhaps I appear to you a coward…

I am not one myself, nor was I born from such

I know how to love my friend

and hate my enemy, and bite him painfully like

an ant. So there is truth in this speech.

Several points in this brief passage deserve attention: first, we can note that Archilochos borrows here the vocabulary of established authority to then ascribe it to himself. The lines about loving a friend and hating an enemy, for instance, are slight variations on a code of ethics most famous from elitist, epic texts from the 8^th and 7^th centuries BCE. His denial that he is a coward (deilos) similarly suggests epic heroism. But in the brief sentence that follows, critically, he does not position himself as a mighty warrior, but rather as an ant: an animal easily killed, far from regal—but still, in the moment of attack, deeply painful. It is perhaps for this reason that the scholar Eustathius tells us that there was, in antiquity, a saying: to “step on Archilochos.” It meant to step on a painful, stinging object such as a scorpion or a thorn.        

What really interests me, however, is Archilochos’ choice to adopt a position of powerlessness: that of an ant, or a cicada, caught in the machinery of much larger power, and yet asserting one’s ability to fight back by publicly ridiculing one’s more powerful enemy. To be clear, this sort of strategy will not change the balance of physical power; but it has the potential to mobilize broader public resistance to the misuse of that physical power. That, in a nutshell, is what I think the Portland Frog Brigade is doing.

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The Archilochean position of powerlessness is not one that is designed to lead to immediate victory. But it can, as the Parian poet suggested nearly 3000 years ago, bring ridicule and contempt down onto those in positions of power.

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In numerous local news and social media posts, we see the terrifying and ridiculous spectacle of a group of cartoon animals coming face-to-face with ICE agents, who are dressed in fatigues, body armor, sunglasses, and face masks. In several of these videos the cartoon animals engage in sexually provocative taunts against their armed opponents, “air humping” directly in front of them. They frequently appeal to the ICE agents as fellow citizens, asking them to consider what they are doing. Frequently, they just taunt them, hoping to break through their authoritarian façade. In one video, the cartoon animals stand in a loose circle after ICE agents run out, grab a bystander, and drag him into the ICE facilities, and simply chant “Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame.” This act is, I think, a contemporary equivalent of Archilochos’ “you are a huge joke among the townsfolk.”

Several protesters in interviews suggest that their choice of costumes is meant to reflect the absurdity of the government’s current overreach. As one of them, Jack Dickinson, said, “It just makes it seem sillier when they come after us”. Another frog says in a YouTube video, “We can’t be any more vulnerable, and we’re showing our full selves to these fully armed authoritarians.” By adopting the position of the powerless, the Frog Brigade exposes the ICE agents as bullies. They also call attention to the fact that the ICE agents are themselves in costume (a fact that is highlighted by their wearing of face masks). Their costumes are designed to project power and menace and to enact fear; the frogs counter that menace by responding with mocking laughter. There is also a more specific political message here as well. Because President Trump has accused Portland of being overrun by dangerous and violent terrorists, the Frog Brigade responds with silliness: “It was just to contrast the narrative that we are violent terrorists,” protester Seth Todd states. Their protest, like that of Archilochos, speaks the truth while also mocking those who oppose them.

Even this position is not, of course, without its risks. The ICE agents disguised as ICE agents have real power which is sometimes deployed with active brutality. In one widely shared video, an ICE agent sprays pepper spray directly into the intake vent of Seth Todd’s frog costume: an act, one might point out, of violent terrorism against an unarmed, peaceful citizen protester. The thin nylon costume evidently gave Mr. Todd more protection than one might have thought; he was not seriously harmed and returned on subsequent days to the protest.

This is not the first time that our government has violently attacked US citizens engaging in their constitutionally guaranteed right to protest, and it won’t be the last. But the Frog Brigade has been undeterred by these acts of governmental violence, and public resistance to the authoritarian actions of ICE is growing. After the recent fatal shooting in Minneapolis of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked in the intensive care unit of a Veteran’s Administration hospital, the actions of ICE are meeting increased protest and coming under greater public scrutiny. The Archilochean position of powerlessness is not one that is designed to lead to immediate victory. But it can, as the Parian poet suggested nearly 3000 years ago, bring ridicule and contempt down onto those in positions of power who fail to uphold the values that legitimize their authority.