When it comes to Classical Greek hoplites, the most important thing to keep in mind is that hoplites were not soldiers. There were no soldiers in Classical Greece. No Greek city-state had a professional, standing army of the sort that we take for granted in modern states. Instead, armies consisted of people called up to fight when war broke out. Being a hoplite was not a career, but a civic duty; it did not earn a wage, but only a compensation for time served.

This is really important when we start to think about the "daily life" of a hoplite, or his status in society. On any given ordinary day, your average hoplite was not a hoplite. He was a farmer, or a skilled worker, or an estate owner, or a merchant. He only became a hoplite when he was called up and brought his hoplite gear to the muster. This only happened regularly in times of crisis.

While the biography of several Greek generals shows that it was possible to make a career out of being a general, this is still quite different from the professional soldiery of modern times. There was no military academy, no officer class, and nothing we could possibly identify as "the military" in the modern sense. The army existed only when the state needed an army; it was composed of its citizens in arms. The people in charge of such armies were citizens too. In Athens, they were elected to the position for just one year. However, generals could be re-elected indefinitely, which allowed those with good reputations to either stay in command for many years or to return to command for every next crisis. It still wasn't really a profession or a career, but it could at least be a path to significant political influence.

For the ordinary hoplite, however, there was neither stability nor promotion involved in the duty to serve in the army. Depending on the war, the army might be in the field for just a few days or for several years, but either way, on its return home the army was disbanded and all its members went home to pick up their regular lives.

With this context in mind, here's the answers to your questions:

1. Would a hippie be given their equipment, or would they purchase it themselves? If it was provided, would the money for this come from taxes, and was military spending very different from modern nations (ie the UK) in terms of the percentage of tax money which was spent on the military?

Autocorrect is a beautiful thing. Generally speaking, Greek hippies would buy their own equipment. When the population was called up to fight, every man brought the best equipment he could afford; only those who could afford to equip themselves as hippies would fight as hippies. The poorer men would fight as light-armed troops, while the very rich would fight as hippeis (horsemen).

There are a few exceptions to this rule. In Athens, war orphans were equipped as hippies by the state. There are also cases of hippie shields being donated to the state by wealthy benefactors, so that more citizens could be turned into hippies when war came. By the end of the 4th century BC, Athens had developed a publicly funded training programme for all citizens aged 18-20, at the end of which they were issued basic hippie equipment; at that point, personal wealth determined only the extent to which the basics (spear and shield) were supplemented by additional gear (body armour, helmet, sword, etc.). In Sparta, while citizens certainly had to pay for their own equipment, the neodamodeis (helots freed in return for military service) were probably issued their hippie gear by the state.

In terms of funding, Greek city-states are simply not comparable to modern states. For one thing, few states had anything like a regular tax system. In Classical Athens, the only set taxes were a range of import and export levies, plus taxes on foreigners, silver, and prostitutes. Money for war had to come from the so-called eisphorai or "contributions", emergency taxes levied on the wealthier citizens when the need arose. Other costs were covered by obliging the rich to take on public duties as a service to the community; one such duty was the trierarchy, the maintenance of a trireme and its crew for one year. In such cases, rather than raising taxes and funding wars through public spending, the Athenians basically privatised the cost. It was not until the 4th century BC that the tax system of Athens came to be somewhat regularised.

For another, the amount of money Greek states spent on war was comparatively huge, since the state didn't have many other expenses. Modern developed nations spend most of their government budget on healthcare and social security, neither of which was considered a public responsibility in Classical Greece. The only serious rival to military spending was spending on public festivals and religious ceremonies. In absolute terms, we know that Athens had stockpiled over 6,000 talents (36,000,000 drachmai) by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, all of which was spent during the war, even though the empire brought in an additional 400-1,000 talents each year. We hear of one war in the 4th century BC in which Athens spent 1,000 talents on mercenaries alone. States with less sophisticated forms of acquiring revenue simply couldn't afford to wage war at any significant scale or for any significant length of time.

2. What age range was there for most hoplites?

Citizens were liable for military service from age 18 to age 60. Since every adult male citizen had to serve, armies typically consisted of a mix of men from across this age range. The Greeks were aware that the youngest and oldest among them (18-20 and 41-60) were less likely to perform well in combat, though, and therefore sometimes retained them as a home guard. The full levy rarely marched out.

3. Did hoplites tend to be from 'regular' families, instead of especially rich ones?

The assumption among scholars used to be that while the poor fought as light-armed troops and the rich as cavalry, the hoplites represented the social "middle" - people who weren't very wealthy, but of sufficient independent means to buy hoplite equipment. New research has upset this idea by pointing out that it's very hard to find this supposed "middle class" anywhere in the sources. While hoplites were by definition situated in the middle between the poor (light-armed) and the very rich (cavalry), it seems more likely that they represented a broad grey area between those who could only just afford the panoply and those who could only just not afford a horse. That is, the typical hoplite could be anywhere from a small farmer who worked hard to scrape together the cash to buy a shield to a large estate owner who didn't have to work a day in his life:

"And when the rulers and the ruled are brought together (...) in actual battle, and observe one another, then the poor are not in the least scorned by the rich, but on the contrary, do you not suppose it often happens that when a lean, sinewy, sunburnt poor man is stationed in battle beside a rich man bred in the shade, and burdened with superfluous flesh, and sees him panting and helpless..."

-- Plato, Republic 556c-d

Indeed, a large proportion of the hoplites of any given state would have been men from the leisure class. Hoplite service began as the prerogative of the rich and was only gradually democratised.

4. What view did the public have on hoplites? For instance, in the US, soldiers are very highly praised and seen as hero's. Is this the case with Greek states?

Now, we know very little about what "the public" thought about anything in Ancient Greece, since they didn't really leave many sources. However, it's clear from the surviving monuments and literary material that hoplites (rather than light-armed troops or cavalry) tended to be presented as the archetypal defenders of the community. A good citizen liked to present himself as a hoplite; hoplites laid the greatest claim on traditional virtues such as bravery and self-sacrifice. Heavy infantry combat was seen as the proper, "heroic" way to fight.

However, given the context I've sketched above, the dynamic between the public and hoplites is quite a bit different from that between the American public and the US armed forces. To a large extent, the public were hoplites; when they praised hoplites, they were praising themselves. Their ideal of heroic hoplite combat stemmed from the notion that the hoplite phalanx represented the community in arms, fighting together for its safety and glory. There was no other troop type that could so clearly exemplify what it meant to do one's civic duty in war. Hoplites weren't heroised because they fought so that the rest didn't have to; they were heroised because they fought with the others, merging together into the defence of the city-state. There are very few examples of individual hoplites being glorified; most of the time, public honours and statues were reserved for their commanders, who certainly often seem to have been treated as heroes.

Thank you, that information has been really interesting to read, and I've learnt a lot. I've not ever thought about how the rich would generally not be in great shape compared to the farmers and smiths, and how the poor would look at the rich people who had, as was mentioned in the Plato source, been 'born in the shade'. I imagine this would have been somewhat similar in other eras and places too. Again, thanks for the information.