Do words really ever have an effect?

Adams reads the conversion of the lover's soul in Phaedrus as an allegory for rhetoric. He is wrong. In the Phaedrus, Socrates presents the charioteer and his two horses as a metaphor for the human soul. The soul, when it falls in love, first succumbs to a kind of manic love and then, through the shock of perceiving the ideal form of beauty, is converted to true love. Adams reads this entire process as an allegory for the two-way effect of rhetoric: the beauty in the boy's face corresponds to the unadorned truth in the rhetor's topoi (i.e. not just any topoi, but ones that are based on truth); the audience, like the charioteer and his horses perceiving the beauty, are blown away by the sheer power of this unadorned rhetoric and are further given a cue on how to employ this same method back to their audience (in this case, the beautiful boy). But why does Adams claim that Plato intended this to be read and why does he claim that it is best read as an "allegory." It makes more sense, in terms of Plato as well as in terms of rhetoric, to understand--not the horses and charioteer; this is clearly a metaphor for the soul--but the process itself as a literal description of how an audience is won over. That is, being won over by the beautiful face of the speaker is not a metaphor for the effect this speaker's words have: this is in fact how the speaker wins us over. That is not to say that every speaker that we are won over by has a beautiful face, but it is to say that we have already identified with the speaker's image to some extent before we are won over. Once we have identified with the image that someone projects, they are going to be effective and if they aren't effective then it's because we have--usually this is an unconscious process--rejected the image they project. Now, the Internet corrects for this to some extent, but even a purely discursive exchange between two people who never see each other's image will at some point reach the stage at which an identification is made and this identification, visual in essence, is much more powerful than any opinion one has formed on the basis purely of another person's words. For example, one of the people in the chat room will say to the other, hey, we've known each other for a long time, why don't you send me a picture. Let's say the other person refuses and makes up an excuse. Now, even without ever having seen that person who refuses to give them a picture, the first person will form an image based on the fact that the other person is a person who doesn't want to send out a picture. OK, sorry, this is going on too long. The point is that Adams is exactly right in his interpretation of how rhetoric works but is exactly wrong in demoting Plato's description of this process to the level of allegory, an extraneous step that it seems is an attempt by Adams to save rhetoric from the obvious truth that Socrates (and this is consistent with the Socrates who in other places tries to get people to see that words don't really ever have a positive effect in attaining the good, true, and beautiful; they can only make us see what we don't know) is promoting: it's not words that have an effect, it is only beauty. Adams, despite his best effort and because the recourse to allegory is clearly superfluous, demonstrates only that, as in his case, the study of the effect words have is all just a cover-up, a way to console ourselves by persisting in the illusion that words have any persuasive force, an illusion of mastery in the face of helplessness.