This may not make much difference to these benchmarks, but these commands and the nearly-equivalent:

  $ time python2 -c exit

cause Python to execute the following script:

  exit

This will look up the exit function, and then do nothing with it before the script exits due to reaching the end of the file. Interestingly, the representation of this function is set to generate the message that reminds you how to get out of the interactive interpreter if you type "exit".

You can get the results you want with:

  $ time python -c ''

meaning: Load Python, run a completely empty script, and clean up.