With these two volumes, Storin provides an immense boon to the study of the letters of Gregory of Nazianzus. In the first volume, he offers the first English translation of Gregory's letter collection—and a fantastic one at that. It is based on Paul Gallay's second critical edition published in the Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS) series in 1969. Storin omits from his translation the so-called “theological letters” (Letters 101, 102, and 202) since these were not transmitted in the manuscripts of Gregory's letters (and are widely available elsewhere). Also omitted are those letters now considered inauthentic (Letters 88, 241, 243, and 249). In the second volume, a monograph, Storin interprets Gregory's letter collection as an “epistolary autobiography,” a novel approach that is unpacked in Self-Portraiture, chapter 1. By “epistolary autobiography,” Storin does not mean taking a traditional approach and stitching together the bits of autobiographical information found in Gregory's letters to tell the story of his life. No, Storin is doing something far more interesting and inventive methodologically. In chapter 2 of Self-Portraiture, he studies the extant manuscripts of Gregory's letter collection and shows that originally the letters were not arranged chronologically, as has been the case in editions of Gregory's letters since the Renaissance, but rather prosopographically. In other words, the collection in its original format consisted of several interrelated “dossiers” or “clusters” of letters anchored by a central figure. For example, there is a “Nicobulus dossier” centered on Nicobulus, the great-nephew of Gregory, whose request for Gregory to send him some of his letters as models for his own compositions was the initial impetus for the whole collection. There is also a “Basil dossier,” which includes Gregory's letters to and from Basil of Caesarea as well as letters to other members of their social circle. There are several other addressee-based dossiers and clusters identified by Storin, but the Nicobulus and Basil clusters are the twin foci of the collection. This discovery leads Storin to claim that the authorship of the letter collection “resides as much in editorial act of compilation as in the individual acts of epistolographical composition” (Letter Collection, 10). In other words, the original arrangement of the letter collection encodes a self-presentation and thus provides insight into Gregory as much as the individual letters themselves do.

Accordingly, Storin attempts to reconstruct, on the basis of the manuscripts and so far as is possible, the original structure of Gregory's letter collection as it was arranged by Gregory himself. While some questions in regard to this reconstruction will always remain unsettled, such as the precise order of the letters within each dossier, Storin's translation presents Gregory's letters in an order that approximates the original version of Gregory himself, enabling the modern reader to encounter it much as its early readers did. As a translator, Storin attempts to convey Gregory's self-acknowledged “natural, conversational style” (Letter Collection, 11) by contractions and other means, reproducing his lively and pungent prose and capturing the wittiness and humor found in many of the letters. The translation includes in-line references to scriptural and classical works as a way of recreating the experience of the early readers of Gregory's letters, who would have recognized the allusions. The translation is preceded by a prosopography of the persons mentioned in the letters, while the annotation to the letters themselves by way of endnotes is laconic. The translation is eminently readable and entirely successful.

Having reconstituted the original arrangement of Gregory's letter collection (so far as it can be), the question arises: Why these letters in this arrangement? Storin suggests that Gregory's selection of letters and their arrangement was an exercise in “reputation and legacy management” (Self-Portraiture, 131) in response to his situation in the early 380s, when the letter collection was released. The final three chapters of Self-Portraiture are devoted to the three primary ways in which Gregory presented himself in his letter collection: as an eloquent master of rhetoric and literary expression, as a philosopher who epitomized the cultivation of virtue and truth-telling, and as the chief friend and heir of the great but recently dead Basil of Caesarea. This, according to Storin, is how Gregory wanted to be remembered, and Storin's demonstration of these three “colors” of his self-presentation is largely persuasive.

Storin notes that Gregory's threefold epistolary self-presentation was without exception accepted by later generations, but he does not spend much time analyzing its veridical basis—a task that in any case would be methodologically fraught. Yet in the case of the third “color,” Gregory as the unique friend and heir of Basil, Storin does make some brief remarks that challenge it, suggesting that Gregory's biographers, ancient and modern, have uncritically accepted Gregory's depiction of his friendship with Basil. Storin shows that in the wake of Basil's death in 378, by which time he was a theological and ecclesiastical juggernaut in the region, there were others competing to be recognized as his heirs to bolster their own pro-Nicene bona fides—his brother Gregory of Nyssa, his protégé (and Gregory of Nazianzus's cousin) Amphilochius of Iconium, and his episcopal successor Helladius of Caesarea. And Storin demonstrates further that Gregory's letters contest their claims to Basil's legacy. Was it one of these three who had a better claim than Gregory? Did Gregory overstate his case? Was Gregory not the intimate friend of Basil that he made himself out to be? The full work of deconstruction Storin leaves to others.

These volumes do not only have the potential for significantly revising our understanding of Gregory in particular and the Cappadocians in general. Storin's books also make it abundantly clear what sort of payoff there is for meticulous attention to manuscript evidence and the earliest recoverable forms in which texts were presented. He has made a convincing case that the small units of early and late antique literature, such as letters and sermons, cannot be studied apart from the ancient collections into which they were gathered and transmitted to subsequent generations. There was always an agenda in making such collections, especially when an author was assembling his own works, and the meaning of the individual pieces that comprise the collections is inextricably bound up with the larger purposes of the collections themselves.