About the command line interface, I would expect that "timeit -n 10 --duplicate 10 STMT" would run STMT 100 times. I chose this behaviour in perf timeit:
http://perf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli.html#timeit-cmd


Current behaviour chosen by Serhiy, -n3 --duplicate=3 runs STMT 3 times:

$ ./python -m timeit --duplicate=3 -r 1 -n 3 'print("bla")'
bla
bla
bla
3 loops, best of 1: 21.8 usec per loop