Dante

is the main antagonist of the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, first introduced in the episode "Dante of the Deep Forest". She is an old cold woman and a formidable alchemist herself. As the true master of all Homunculi, Dante is responsible for setting in motion the events of the series and the challenges its protagonists must face along the way.

Dante does not exist in the manga, as the creator and leader of the Homunculi in the manga is an enigmatic being simply called "Father".

Character's history
Dante first appears as the former alchemy teacher of Izumi Curtis, who in turn taught the protagonists Edward and Alphonse Elric. Soon after her meeting with the Elrics, Dante faked her death at the hands of the Homunculus Greed, who is in turn killed by Ed, although it is obvious to the viewer that her body was dead before Greed had arrived.

Much later in the series, it is revealed that Dante had transferred her soul to Lyra's body, thereby prolonging her life. Dante is actually around 400 years old and is able to escape death by continually transferring her soul to new, younger bodies with the aid of the Philosopher's Stone. Nearly 400 years ago, she was Hohenheim's lover, and together they lived for centuries using this technique. They even had a son; however, he died of mercury poisoning at a young age. Hohenheim's attempt to transmute him back to life created Envy.

The first Philosopher's Stone that Dante and Hohenheim made used those condemned as witches and those dying of the plague as the required human sacrifice. In the course of performing this transmutation, Hohenheim was nearly killed; Dante saved him by instinctively attaching his soul to the body of another man; thus the pair discovered "eternal" life. In addition to this first Stone, Dante and Hohenheim were responsible for the destruction of at least two ancient cities: one located where the present capital of Amestris, Central, now stands, and a "fabled lost city in the east" (in reality, Hohenheim's home city), each of which is said to have mysteriously disappeared overnight. The inhabitants of the cities were used as ingredients in the Stone, while the buildings were pulled underground with alchemy. However, some time prior to the beginning of the anime, Hohenheim left Dante, eventually meeting Trisha Elric twenty years prior and falling in love with her.

Suddenly left to fend for herself, Dante resorted to using the Homunculi to do her bidding. She seeks out Homunculi from the moment they are created (when an alchemist tries to bring a dead person back to life) and feeds them Red Stones, thus strengthening them. She convinces the Homunculi that they will be better off as true humans, and makes them believe that she can transform them into true humans with the power of the Philosopher's Stone. Hence, the Homunculi become her minions in helping her to create the Stone. In reality, she only wants the Stone for herself in order to continue cheating death. Only Pride and Envy seem aware of this. The former serves Dante in exchange for power and adulation while the latter does so to kill as many humans as possible.

Unwilling to risk creating a Philosopher's Stone herself, Dante seeks to manipulate someone else into unwittingly doing so for her. However, she reasons that only someone with nothing left to lose would go so far as to sacrifice the many human souls required to create a Philosopher's Stone. Thus she uses the Homunculi (especially Führer King Bradley, who is secretly the Homunculus Pride) to wage unceasing war, hoping to motivate a desperate alchemist to create a Philosopher's Stone, which the Homunculi would then steal for her. To this end, she orchestrates the slaughters in Ishbal and Lior, and later, to cover her tracks, she orders Pride to attack Drachma, a country to the north. In the latter campaign, she plans to use the chaos on the front lines as a cover for the planned assassinations of Roy Mustang and his subordinates by Envy, though he returned upon hearing that she disposed of Hohenheim and refused to help until she reminded him of the Elric brothers had the Stone, giving Envy the pleasure to kill Ed (his replacement) and get Al (the stone). She soon switches bodies with a local alchemist named Lyra.

Due to her rapidly decaying body from over usage of the soul transfer, this being caused because every time she transfered she left a piece of her soul in her previous body, Dante had planned to transfer her soul into Rose's body next using the Philosopher's Stone that was inside Al's body. This way, she hoped to gain control of Ed, hoping Rose's feelings for him would allow her to control him and have him replace Hohenheim as her lover. But after Ed refused to aid her, Dante sent him away to the other side for a short while. When Ed did return and got killed by Envy, Al sacrificed himself to save his brother, destroying the Philsopher's Stone, while Ed's death manages to shock Rose out of Dante's control, to Dante's dismay. As she escape into the elevator to find Pride to help her exact vengeance, she is devoured by Gluttony, whom she had ironically rendered crazed and mindless earlier.

Last Words:You don't understand, do you Gluttony? Just hold on, we'll find you something to eat soon, okay?

Personality and abilities
Dante's personality and motivation are very enigmatic. She is manipulative, single-minded, devious and vindictive. In her long years as a parasitic soul, moving from body to body, her personality has apparently changed considerably: as Hohenheim lay dying after creating the Philosopher's Stone she rushed to save him, but now she cares little for the lives of others, believing those who die in order to preserve her life to be "necessary martyrs." Dante exhibits a misanthropic view of the world, believing most human beings to be "selfish, ignorant creatures", unworthy of the knowledge of alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone. As such, she has no qualms over starting wars or taking countless lives, as she is convinced that she is ultimately protecting mankind from itself. This is all Dante cares about, global politics and wars are just mean nothing to her, she has control of Ametris through her Homunculus Pride, and uses the whole country as a tool to gain the Stone.

Dante is an amazingly skilled alchemist - probably the second most powerful, after Hohenheim, featured in the series. Like Hohenheim, Ed, and Izumi (and later Al) she can transmute without a circle, completing complex transmutations just by clapping her hands. Though she has never crafted a Philosopher's Stone herself, it is not because she lacks the skill or knowledge but more likely because she fears the consequences; when Hohenheim first forged a Stone it nearly killed him. She also possesses other abilities that go beyond normal alchemy: she is able to summon the Gate using infants (whose souls are more strongly linked to the Gate than those of adults), transform Gluttony from a childish fool into a ravenous monster, and split the mind, soul and body of Hohenheim before sending him into the Gate. Dante is also the only known person to attempt a human transmutation specifically in order to create Homunculi (Gluttony, Pride and possibly Greed).

She uses the symbol of a winged snake fixed on a cross (called a flamel), which is passed on to Izumi, and then to the Elric brothers. It is meaningful that the symbol is the opposite of the Ouroboros worn by the Homunculi. It represents a fixation on the volatile principle in alchemy, as opposed to the endless cycle represented by Ouroboros. In Dante's case, the symbol likely represents her belief that she is immortal and has conquered the cycle of birth and death represented by the Ouroboros. In real life, it is a symbol associated with the 15th-century alchemist Nicholas Flamel, who claimed to have created a Philosopher's Stone and used it to achieve immortality (one of the two main goals of alchemy, along with the creation of gold from lead).

Trivia

 * She may possibly be named after the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, famous for writing "The Divine Comedy". A poem heavily centered around the Seven Deadly Sins.