The concept of eclecticism is actually quite simple. Both the term and its practice have a long history, which can be traced back to classical Greek philosophy. The Greek verb eklegein or eklegesthai means ‘to choose’. In its broader sense, eclecticism refers to picking and selecting different philosophical doctrines and combining them together—much like Seneca's bees, which made nectar gathered from different flowers into honey. Paleotti referred to the bees that produced sweet honey out of a variety of wildflowers, while also drawing an analogy to spiders, which, like Seneca's bees, gather wildflowers but use them to produce lethal poison rather than honey. This type of dichotomy is characteristic of Paleotti's method throughout his discourse. The bee metaphor also found expression in Malvasia's book Felsina Pittrice, in which he considered Ludovico as ‘an ingenious bee that extracted the sweet essences from all the flowers of paintings, not leaving even the gardens of the Vatican untapped’.

Eclecticism, then, expresses a need to pick and choose. It may be associated with a confused and casual combination of ideas, as perceived by the Greek physician and philosopher Galen. However, it may also be regarded as a distinguished and careful choice, as is evident in the writings of Diogenes Laertius, the biographer of the Greek philosophers.

In early modern discourse, eclecticism was regarded much as it was by the Greek philosophers, as expressed in Michel de Montaigne's Essays(1580).