The conclusion to be drawn, then, from the foregoing pages, though not earthshattering, is at least of moment for the rhetor. As we have seen, time and time again the ploy of the many authors cited here, not to mention the present author, is to introduce some model or models that embody the ideas and structures of which the author wishes to convince or persuade the audience. And considering the metaphorical nature of much of the language we use when we do communicate, this is as it should be. Looking back over our subject, we see that even the basic tools that the rhetor uses—tools like words, phrases, and figures of speech—are steeped in the broth of our metaphorical soup, of our models. The metaphor itself, one of the most often used tools in human communication, not to mention the similes and the many other figures of speech, is often powerful enough on its own to drive home the very persuasiveness of our arguments. And the analogies we weave into our arguments, as well as the larger models we introduce into the discussion—such as those of duality, the trinity, and the septenary, found everywhere and at all times in religion, mythology, art, and even science—should be enough to persuade even the most obstinate disbeliever of the power and utility of the modeling approach to Rhetoric.

As we know, Rhetoric goes back only to the time of the ancient Greeks, about 600 BCE. But the use of rhetorical strategies of metaphor and modeling surely extends throughout the whole of recorded history, and most likely even beyond this right back to the very invention of modern language and culture by early Homo Sapiens Sapiens, some fifty thousand years ago. The oldest examples of human art, paintings and carvings found in the caves of southern Europe, of Australia, and of Africa, displaying many of the elements of contemporary culture—the animals of the hunt and the men and women of the cults—belie the importance and significance of the artificial representation—of the model—to even these incipient intellectuals. And the whole of the history of art, literature, and culture from those remote times up to the present speak volumes toward the argument that what worked for them is still significant and effective for us today.