Dante

Dante (ダンテ, Dante) is the main antagonist of the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist anime, first introduced in Episode 32. She is a cold elderly woman and a formidable alchemist herself. Posing as the 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".

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 Ishval and Reole, 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).

However, Dante's immortality is a lie, as was revealed by Hohenheim when he confronts her after so long. Her body is literally rotting away because every time she transferred her soul, she left a piece of her soul in her previous body, and overtime her soul had been reduced by so much it cannot support her human form, so 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 Philosopher's Stone, while Ed's death manages to shock Rose out of Dante's control, much to her dismay. As she escapes 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.

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 Amestris 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 (Greed, Pride, and possibly Gluttony).

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).

Relationships
As an egomaniac, Dante has very few meaningful relationships, and those she does have are not depicted in depth until very late in the series, considering the necessary mystery that surrounds her secret-identity as the super-villain.

Envy
Despite Envy being the homunculus of her son, Dante has no actual feelings for him. Their only common ground probably lies in the feelings of rejection they were each dealt when Hohenheim abandoned them. The immense strength she endowed him with through red stones and his awareness of her true intentions make him her unofficial enforcer among the other homunculi and her most reliable agent in securing the Philosopher's Stone.

The fact that Envy knows Dante has only her own interests in mind and the way he uncaringly disobeys her makes it clear that they work together to accomplish parallel goals rather than the same one: Dante works to prolong her life at the cost of human suffering and death and Envy works to bring about such suffering and death for his own amusement. Dante later proves that she shares no real alliance with Envy when she "kills" Hohenheim, an act of vengeance that had heretofore provided Envy with his only justification for existing. The conversation Envy has with Al following this event hints that he is at least vaguely aware that Dante manipulates him emotionally but, again, doesn't care very much since he takes pleasure in doing the things she wants him to do. When Envy is later lost to Al's transmutation to revive Edward, Dante doesn't even mention him during her rant over losing the stone, further solidifying that he had no real meaning to her other than "pawn".

As an additional note, the fact that Dante willingly made Envy as strong as he was (possibly far stronger than the other homunculi, seeing as how they were afraid of him and didn't fight back when confronted by him) and the fact that he took no action against her for "killing" Hohenheim may further prove that between the two of them, she held the real power. Her pejorative comment that Hohenheim (her equal) was undone "by a homunculus of all things" may indicate that Envy--and the other homunculi, for that matter--had good reason to fear her.

Izumi Curtis
Despite her genereal distaste for humans, Dante hints that her affection for Izumi is genuine. While at first it could be seen that Izumi was simply another candidate for a body-swap, the scene depicting Izumi's decision to leave depicts Dante as feeling honestly dejected and disappointed. Following Izumi's attempt at human transmutation (of which Dante was most definitely aware because she followed that sort of thing in attempt to find homunculi as potential pawns), the damgage done to her body would have most definitely excluded her as a body-swap candidate, yet Dante still tries to maintain a positive relationship with her. She provides Izumi with medicinal herbs to counter the consequences of her "sin", offers occasional guidance, and the casual discourse they share following Al's abduction indicates they may have still spoken with one another on occasion despite their differences. Her final farewell to Izumi is also heartfelt and she seems genuinely sad that they would not likely ever meet again.

Trivia

 * She may possibly be named after the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who was famous for writing "The Divine Comedy", a poem that is heavily centered around the Seven Deadly Sins.
 * Dante shares many similarities with her manga counterpart, Father:
 * Both, at one point, had close relationships with Hohenheim dating back several centuries.
 * Both "shared" the secret of eternal life with Hohenheim by means of the Philosopher's Stone.
 * Both planned to turn mass numbers of people into Stones in order to become "perfect" beings.
 * Both Dante and Father have the most physical transformations through the course of their respective series (excluding Envy, of course), with each of them gaining a much younger body for themselves.
 * Both Dante and Father are hypocritical in that they consider humans to be lower beings, yet their respective reliances on the Philosopher's Stone render them both dependent on the human race for survival, technically making them little more than parasites.
 * During her clash with Edward Elric in the hidden city, she states that the Law of Equivalent Exchange is false and that even if a person gives their full effort it is unlikely that they will recieve a reward of equal value. Her words prove ironically true as she attempts to escape and realizes that her efforts in creating the stone were more or less wasted.
 * An elderly woman almost identical to Dante (her elder form) makes a brief cameo in Episode 58 of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood.
 * Dante seems to commit each of the Seven Deadly Sins in her appearances:
 * Pride: she has an air of superiority and speaks condescendingly whenever she is surrounded by the Homunculi and sees all those around her as inferior to herself. She feels the thousands of lives lost to the Philosopher's Stone are inconsequential because she is better than any of them and deserves it.
 * Envy: she showed hints of jealousy when Hohenheim refused her advances saying that Trisha was the only person he loved.
 * Wrath: she was furious when her plans did not turn out to her liking and was quick to punish anyone who failed her or dared interefere--even former lover Hohenheim and her homuculi servants.
 * Sloth: despite being a very powerful Alchemist, she prefers to use other alchemists to forge the Stone for her and tasks the Homunculi with all the footwork.
 * Greed: her plans to gain the Philosopher Stone are out of a selfish act of having her life extended.
 * Lust: the act of having her soul transferred to other bodies violates her victims. She also takes care in selecting more lascivious bodies to steal. Later, while meeting Hohenheim, she licks her own arm, states she hasn't tested out her new body (Lyra's body), suggesting they sleep together. She also makes mention of her plan to take over Rose's body and use it to seduce Edward and "be loved by the son of Hohenheim."
 * Her desire to have her life extended represents the sin of Gluttony: the sin of having more.
 * It's hinted in the series that the sin of Gluttony is Dante's most grievous offense. When she tells Edward that she is no longer human, the homunculus Gluttony bursts into the room to carry out a scene that reveals him to be more human than she. When she later takes away Gluttony's mind (his last bit of humanity), she serves to transform him into the physical manifestation of her own monstrosity and is ultimately consumed by him.
 * It's likely that Dante's knowledge and skills in alchemy far surpassed those of anyone else in the series, with the possible exception of Hohenheim--and even then, the different directions their alchemy research took them did grant them an uneven equality (meaning that even though Hohenheim is more skilled than Dante, the fields of Alchemy she studied--homunculi and the Gate--allowed her to get one up on him).
 * Dante is one of the very few individuals to have an appendage inside Gluttony's mouth and survive.