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Decapitation and dismemberment are linked with civil war and become emblems of it in Latin poetry. They express its paroxysmal horrors and deviances insofar as they reveal the cruelty of enemies towards each other and prevent any recognition of outraged corpse in contrast to the Roman tradition. After situating these two motifs in a literary history of poetic representations of civil war from the Augustan to the Flavian period, they will be considered in their political significance, in connection with a specifically Roman organicist tradition. Finally, these two motifs converge especially in Lucan’s Pharsalia which enhances an unleashing of violence specific to civil wars as the overthrow of any norm.