Vanderlyn took the story of Marius from Plutarch's Parallel Lives. A military leader elected Roman consul six times, Marius fell from power during the political turbulence of the 2nd century BC. He fled to the North African coast, where he hoped to gather troops. On his arrival at Carthage, an official instructed him that the Governor Sextilius “forbids thee . . . to set foot in Africa; and if you disobey him, he says that he will uphold the decrees of the senate and treat you as a public enemy.” Marius responded, “Tell him that you have seen Caius Marius sitting as a fugitive among the ruins of Carthage.”

As Vanderlyn wrote:

I thought the man and the position combined, was capable of showing in two great instances the instability of human grandeur—a city in ruins and a fallen general. I endeavoured to express in the countenance of Marius the bitterness of disappointed ambitions mixed with the meditation of revenge.

In 1815 Vanderlyn returned to the United States, seeking to foster history painting in the republic. He was unable to generate commissions for such works or even find purchasers for finished paintings. Vanderlyn sold Caius Marius amid the Ruins of Carthage in 1834 to his friend Leonard Kip of New York. The painting has been in California collections since the mid-1850s when it came West with the household goods of Kip's son, Canon (later Bishop) William Ingraham Kip.