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)